Home pages prove hit with browsers

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

Like a lot of people who have set up home web pages, I designed my site as an open letter for friends and relatives.

Liberally illustrated with family photos it functioned as a sort of private newspaper in cyberspace.

Take a trawl through a few of the hundreds of home pages hosted by ihug, for example and you will see this is one of the most popular uses of private web space.

My website's finest hour came when it allowed my parents in Britain to download pictures of their first grandson just hours after he was born.

But my efforts pale in comparison to the home page of Tom and Kathryn Munro Glass, who started a web site when they came to New Zealand on holiday two years ago.

"We had the idea that with a small palmtop computer we could keep our friends and relatives informed of what we were doing," said Mr Munro Glass. "It was a lot easier than sending lots of postcards."

While the diary of this trip can be found on their website, the couple have since moved to this country and now use their site to keep those same relatives and friends up to date with their battle to tame the garden of their house in Governors Bay near Christchurch.

Other people use their home web sites as electronic calling cards. Point your browser at E-Gaz for example, and you can learn a lot about the personal preferences of Aucklander Gary Stevens.

One section chronicles Mr Stevens' vehicular transportation, from pushchair "dumped it at an early age due to low top speed, lack of acceleration, and the fact would only go in the direction my parents pointed it," to his last car, a Mazda Familia XG Turbo, which met an untimely end when it was driven into the ocean.

Such calling card sites are becoming increasingly popular with people who frequent chat rooms.

It is an easy method of letting someone you have just met on the internet learn a little more about you.

Another popular use of home web sites is to cover a hobby or publish specialist information.

A very imaginative example can be found at Mooseys Garden.

This site, which started out as a simple three or four-page affair describing a 0.8 hectare garden in Canterbury, has since mushroomed into something much bigger.

Visitors may now delve into no less than 1300 digital images and 400 pages of information on various aspects of the garden and the local area, including plants, water features and even the weather.

While many overambitious dotcoms foundered last year, Mt Maunganui-based John McClure's Frog Creations is one of a surprising number of home-based dot co nz enterprises that are quietly beginning to thrive.

Mr McClure, a T-shirt printer, began teaching himself the rudiments of web design about nine months ago with a view to selling his shirts to a wider public.

"I started with idiot guides, but there is so much provided on the web, so I increasingly picked up a lot of information from there," he said.

Now Mr McClure's brightly coloured shirts, which feature designs created by his artist brother Royce, are beginning to prove popular with United States buyers.

"Americans are more relaxed about buying online, and they may have more money to spend - the exchange rate helps.

"I also get a few buyers from the United Kingdom, but I very rarely sell to New Zealanders."

Mr McClure says that around 200 people visit the site each day, of whom two or three will buy a shirt.

"It's slowly built up over time. I find that a bit over 1 per cent of visitors actually buy a shirt so the trick is to get the traffic up.

"My goal is to get up to 1000 visitors a day, which would equate to sales of 10 shirts a day."

Mr McClure says learning the basic language of web design, HTML (hypertext markup language) is not at all difficult, but some of the background programming can be.

However, he points out that systems to handle many advanced functions can be found on the web in a ready-to-use form.

"I would recommend anyone who wanted to start a website to do it themselves - you can do it on a shoestring."

Links


Ihug Alphabetical List

Tom and Kathryn Munro Glass

E-Gaz

Mooseys Garden

Frog Creations