WISTA On LINE

Paul Dixon, our Webmaster tells us how he managed to create a free worldwide advertisement for WISTA.

About a year ago, my wife, invited home some WISTA-UK members to have dinner. During the evening, the subject of publicizing WISTA came up.

Full blown colour brochures? Adverts in the trade papers? etc., but all this cost a lot which WISTA-UK did not have. What about a web site? I interrupted, pointing out that it would cost practically nothing, and that I had space to host it.

There and then, I quickly set up a dummy page and printed it out, to convince our dinner guests. They seemed convinced, and at the next international board meeting, approval to set up a site was given. At that moment I became the Webmaster, which is the fancy title used for a person who publishes web pages.

The World Wide Web can be a very powerful publishing tool. Anybody with a computer, modem, an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and some web space, can put a page on the web. They range from a simple “home page” which is rarely visited by people, to professionally designed pages, put out by large multinational companies. A web page is accessed by typing in an address such as http://www.wista.org or http://www.microsoft.com. These addresses are known as URL’s.

The ISP that I use, allows “unlimited” free web space for non-commercial use, and Maria’s membership & WISTA fitted that category. The down side of this was the address. The first pages I “published” for WISTA had a very long “URL” (Universal Resource Locator) - http://web.ukonline.co.uk/maria.dixon2/wista/wista.htm - not exactly easy!

We enrolled a friend, to design a front page, since I am not a graphic artist. I then adapted it and translated it into HTML, the language used for web pages. From the available WISTA literature, I added other pages, such as “What is WISTA”, “What does WISTA do?”, etc. The first version of the site was completed.

The next stage of development, was to try and shorten the URL. This was achieved by using one of my user names and changing it to WISTA. Now the address was http://web.ukonline.co.uk/wista/wista.htm. This was a little better, but still not that easy to remember!. We discussed this, and I found a way around it. However this had costs attached to it. Maria negotiated a deal, and we came away with the address

and an e-mail address. We had achieved the aim of a simple and memorable address!

The next stage was to publicize the site. There are millions of web pages out in cyberland, and most are never seen by anybody, except by chance.

Again, cost was a consideration, so I contacted as many search engines (special web pages that you can look things up) that I could, and logged the WISTA site with them. I also put invisible tags, called META TAGS on the pages.

Now if you go to http://yahoo.com (one of the best known search engines) and type in the word “WISTA“., you will see first Women’s International Shipping and Trading Association, instead of many German pages about WISTA cameras!

I have also developed the on line WISTA calendar, past and future conference pages, an application form, and the WISTA national pages. Already WISTA has pages for various countries, with more to come when and if the national WISTAs provide me with their information. The on line Application form service has been a great success, generating new members worldwide every month. The information is passed to the International Treasurer, who then forwards it to the national WISTA, where applicable.