As well as using the World Wide Web to find things out, from when the Boys Of The Lough are next in your area to the lyrics of Robb Johnson's Hell's Kitchen album the thing quite obviously has its uses for telling others what you want them to know. No, don't stop reading. More and more folk clubs and festivals, not to mention the odd singer or musician, now include a "please visit our web site at http colon slash slash wally wally wally" message in their newsletters and fliers. And you can do it, too.
Web pages are written in HyperText Markup Language – HTML for short – and it is surprisingly easy to write your own source documents, especially if you make liberal use of copying and pasting, as the task tends to be more laborious than difficult. The point of HTML is that by clicking on highlighted bits of text or graphics, you jump to another place on the page, on your computer, or indeed to any site on the Web. So it is useful to learn a few of the tags, if only to write your own "favourites" pages, so you can save time and money by clicking to addresses you have typed in before dialling.
Web pages are becoming more and more flashy, but what many people forget is that not everybody uses a state-of-the-art computer to do their browsing. So make sure your page is still informative with graphics switched off – or that you have a text-only version available.
I recently had to review an HTML editor – software designed purely for writing Web pages – and, as I have nothing to sell and my life is entirely lacking in interest to the other members of this global village, I wondered long and hard what information I might have that they might want.
Imagine my excitement when the listings for my local folk club, the Ram in Claygate, dropped on to the door mat. "Eureka!" I cried, pausing only to dry myself with a towel, and my desire to become the Ram Club's webmaster was born.
HoTMetaL Pro v3 is not the easiest of programs to master, and its graphics are a bit naff, but once you get the hang of it, creating your own HTML documents becomes a bit of an obsession. Particularly useful is that you can use it to convert existing documents into HTML – so by the time you read this, the Folk on Line archive will be up and running. HoTMetaL Pro already comes with a free upgrade – in other words they give you an extra disc with the bits they forgot to put on the original CD-ROM, not to mention fixes for its bugs – that allows you to upload your pages on to your site and is one of the simplest and most useful utility programs I have on my PC.
For graphics – and this means fancy text as well as pictures – a program such as Xara Webster is ideal. Using Webster for the title and HoTMetaL Pro for the body and links, it only took about half an hour to do the Ram Page, which admittedly, for the reasons mentioned above, I kept quite simple.
But what you can't see from the illustration is that, for instance, if you go to the Web-footed Friends of the Ram section and click on Kate Rusby you go straight to Kate's site where you can find details of future gigs, a discography and so on, and hopefully one day on Kate's site there will be a Ram Club link that takes you straight to the Ram Page – hint hint.
HoTMetaL Pro costs around £100, but it is aimed at small businesses rather than personal users, and doesn't seem so expensive when you bear in mind I was recently told by a very nice PR lady that one of her clients would design a site for "£5000 --- which is nothing these days." Oh really?
Once you have your site "published" it would be nice to think someone was reading it, and there are several ways of spreading the word, not least in publications such as this. If it is folk-related, an ideal place to announce your site, particularly if it is new or you have just updated it, is a folk-oriented newsgroup such as uk.music.folk. You can also submit your site to the many search engines available, but there are rules to follow not just in terms of behaviour but also in order to increase your chances of being read – or "hit" as we surfers like to call it. There is a FAQ – answers to frequently asked questions – for announcing your Web site at http://ep.com/faq/webannounce.html.
Oh yes – I nearly forgot – the ubiquitous please visit my web site at http://web.ukonline.co.uk/graham.gurrin, or go straight to the Ram Page at http://web.ukonline.co.uk/graham.gurrin/ram.
PS: Since writing the article HoTMetaL Pro v4 has gone into beta testing and I am supposed to getting a copy to try out. I'll let you know...
I have also received an email from Trevor Gilson, Webmaster for the Fo'c's'le music club, which had a mention in article 2. He recommends the Cranial html notepad editor, which is low cost shareware, and you might like to check out his site to see what he does with it!