Free! The best four-letter word on the Web. Despite the Internet's growing commercialism, its educational and community roots are still out there, offering something for nothing in a tide of e-commerce. Online communities are probably the best example of traditional Web values - everyone can create a page, have their say and connect with people with similar interests. Best of all, there's plenty of webspace out there for free.
Just because it's free, however, doesn't mean that you can't be discriminating. Dozens of online communities are competing to host your home page and offer a variety of services. Here are three of the largest Web communities which are rolling out the welcome mat.
Geocities - www.geocities.com
The granddaddy of all Web communities has some three million members. Recently purchased by the much-larger Yahoo, Geocities is a slick operation, combining Web acumen with a Little House on the Prairie sense of community.
The community is divided into 41 neighbourhoods and Geocities offers 11MB of free space to residents. The idea is that you decide what your home page will be about, select a virtual neighbourhood and stake a claim in suburbia. The problem with this is a clumsy web address. For example, neighbourhood Area51, with a population of 165,476, is dedicated to UFOs and the paranormal. Once you have found a comfortable suburb, such as Cavern, Starship or Labyrinth, you have to find a vacant plot and stake your claim to something like www.geocities.com/Area51/ starship/12345/ - quite an urlful.
Taking up residence couldn't be simpler. Geocities has a selection of templates to help with page construction. Follow the point-and-click wizard and your photo album or CV can be online in minutes. If your get stuck, community leaders are at hand in the chat room to give you a little neighbourly advice.
Geocities also caters for the more technically adept, allowing the creation of subdirectories and providing a full range of tools, including basic and advanced HTML editors, a free image library, hit counters, guestbooks, online forms and even a Java image carousel to rotate favourite family photos. Be aware that the Geocities suburbs are zoned for residential use only. Those who want to set up shop have to sign up for the GeoShops option, which is where the free zone ends.
Angelfire - www.angelfire.com
Not nearly as glamorous as Geocities, Angelfire isn't quite as picky about commercial usage. With an ample 5MB of space, Angelfire allows users to advertise their own companies or products, as long as they don't get payments to place other advertisements on their pages. This is hardly surprising as Angelfire, like Geocities and most free services, launches its own pop-up ads each time a page is accessed.
Angelfire's basic editor is enough to get up and running without any knowledge of HTML, but those who want anything special will have to knuckle down to the advanced section. A library of free images and sounds is available but when creating a site only one images subdirectory is allowed, making the management of complex sites awkward. An Angelfire address scores by being concise. Only two consonants separate the domain name from your user name: www.angelfire.com/eg/username.
Tripod - www.tripod.com
Tripod is generous, with an 11MB allocation of free space, and helpful, with three different ways of building a page. For beginners, the template-based "quick page" couldn't be simpler. "Freeform" is an online HTML editor offering access to a colour palette and a library of over 40,000 images and sounds. For experienced web-builders, a file manager option is available to upload files, create subdirectories or even move an entire site from another location without raising a sweat.
Tripod's ace is its concept of "private pods". Shielding Web enclaves from the hoi polloi, these allow groups a degree of privacy. Clubs, families or businesses can post information for members only and private chat rooms and bulletin boards can be easily created for a specific pod.
Other technical goodies include hit counters, online forms and guestbooks. Web addresses are mercifully short:
members.tripod.com/username/
Dozens of other sites also offer to host webpages for free. Some offer a measly few hundred kilobytes, while others are more generous (easyspace.com offers 25MB) but expect you to be Webclued-in. It is a good idea to check the rules and regulations before setting up home as some make red tape quite an art form, but something for nothing but a few ads is still a pretty good deal.
libbyy@yahoo.com