Announcing Your Web Site to the World

14

By now, you have learned HTML, installed several Internet protocol servers, and designed a professional site. After customizing the sample files in Chapter 13, you have a real Web server on the Internet. So what's next? Let the world know that your site is there, of course!

Your data is available on the Web, but it's useless until the world knows about it. How do you publicize it so that people will read it and be able to refer to it in the future? That's what this chapter is all about.

This is a short chapter. You might be able to register your home page with all of these link clearinghouses in just a few short hours of online time.

The Top Two Places to Hit

The quickest way to bring other Web users to your window is to register with the two Web services discussed here.

First, announce your site with "Announcements of New WWW Servers." Point your browser to http://www.w3.org/hypertext/DataSources/WWW/Geographical_generation/new-servers.html. See Figure 14.1.

Figure 14.1. The W3 Consortium Web page registration service.

After you fill out the form, your server will be registered with the World Wide Web consortium, which maintains a database of all the Web servers on the Internet.

Next, you'll want to stop by Scott Banister's "Submit It." This is a free service designed to make the process of submitting your URLs to a variety of WWW catalogs as fast and easy as possible. Here's the URL: http://submit-it.com/.

Submit It lets you fill out one form and check off which search sites you want your site to be automatically registered with. These are the search databases that Submit It will let you register with: Yahoo, Starting Point, WebCrawler, EINet Galaxy, Lycos, Harvest, What's New Too, and Infoseek. One form or many, the choice is easy.

You might also like to browse through these other index sites, and add links to your home page and/or specific pages at your site.

General Indexes on the Web

This section lists several general resources on the Web where you might want to list your site:

Registering with ALIWEB

ALIWEB stands for Archie Like Searching for the Web. The idea behind ALIWEB is simple. The World Wide Web is growing by leaps and bounds on a daily basis. It is impossible for someone to keep track of all the services available because they change often and there are simply too many of them. Therefore, ALIWEB proposes that people keep track of the services they provide in such a way that programs can automatically retrieve the descriptions and combine them into a searchable database.

http://www.nexor.co.uk/aliweb/doc/registering.html

EINet Galaxy is an electronic guide to a wide array of services on the Internet.

http://www.einet.net

WebCrawler is an excellent search page on the Web. If you would like it to show your name as a result of the searches conducted by others, just fill out their URL submission form. See Figure 14.2.

http://www.webcrawler.com/WebCrawler/WebQuery.html

Figure 14.2. The WebCrawler URL registration form.

The Lycos search page and URL registration forms work similar to WebCrawler, mentioned previously.

http://lycos.cs.cmu.edu/lycos-register.html

The Nikos Search Engine is an online search page and registration form. Nikos is provided by Rockwell. It works by sending Internet robots out to gather information about Web sites and keep it organized in a searchable database. You can have your site added to the database by submitting this form.

http://www.rns.com/www_index/new_site.html

The NetPages White Pages enables you to submit your individual or business address on the Internet. It also runs a Yellow Pages form that offers two lines of free advertising. All entries are verified every six months. You can drop your name from the service at any time. Aldea Communications also maintains an Internet Survival Guide here.

http://www.aldea.com/

Harvest Gatherers is another URL registration service. This one accepts home page listings only—no document specific references. As a bonus, this Web page contains links to other interesting sites and even a query form to let you search the Web.

http://rd.cs.colorado.edu/Harvest/brokers/

Web Business Indexes

These Web resources are geared toward doing business online.

New Riders World Wide Web Yellow Pages

The New Riders Official Yellow Pages is a free service that lists thousands of businesses on the Web. As Figure 14.3 shows, it doesn't just list them, it lets you search them! Electronic searching is perhaps the key advantage that the Web offers, but the information stored in this site is also used to print the annual edition of the popular paperback Web Yellow Pages.

http://www.wwwyp.com

Figure 14.3. New Riders Official Yellow Pages lets you register your Web site or search the database for other businesses on the Internet.

Internet Yellow Pages Registration Form

http://www.yellow.com/

The World Wide Yellow Pages ™ is a cost index service. Just fill out the online form, and they'll take care of the rest. Use e-mail to get more information

E-mail: info@yellow.com

Regular mail: Home Pages, Inc.
World Wide Yellow Pages
257 Castro Street, Suite 219
Mountain View, CA 94041
BizWeb Company Information Form

This index of companies is categorized by the goods or services they provide. Click the key term that best describes the company or product you are searching for. There are currently 776 companies listed on BizWeb.

http://www.bizweb.com/InfoForm/infoform.html

Open Market, Inc. Commercial Sites Index.

Open Market, Inc. develops and markets software and services to facilitate electronic commerce on the Internet and the World Wide Web. It also maintains the Commercial Sites Index as a service to the Internet. See Figure 14.4.

http://www.directory.net/dir/submit.cgi

Figure 14.4. The Open Market Commercial Sites submission form.

The Otis Business Index

The Otis Index maintains more than 100,000 links to free software, books, magazines, newsgroups, and commercial sites.

http://www.interlog.com/~gordo/contactcom.html

WWW Business Yellow Pages

The WWW Business Yellow Pages is a service to the Internet community provided by the University of Houston College of Business Administration. See Figure 14.5.

http://www.cba.uh.edu/cgi-bin/autosub

Figure 14.5. The WWW Business Yellow Pages submission form.

Listings in Hierarchical Indexes

These are general-purpose Web sites that cover many types of businesses.

Yahoo

This is perhaps the best-known Web site. Yahoo contains links to hundreds of other Web pages. Whether you choose to register here or not, you should definitely give it a try. To explore its many features, enter this URL in your Web browser: http://www.yahoo.com/. If you decide that your pages should be listed there too, then you can use this more specific URL: http://www.yahoo.com/bin/add.
Mother of All Bulletin Board Systems

This oddly named site contains hundreds of links to other Web pages. It was developed by Oliver McBryan (mcbryan@cs.colorado.edu) of the University of Colorado. This is a very large index that permits users to automatically add new URLs.

http://www.cs.colorado.edu/homes/mcbryan/public_html/bb/summary.html

Listings Submitted Through E-mail

These Web site listing centers get their input via e-mail:

CUI W3 Catalog; catalog of catalogs

E-mail: www-announce@www.w3.org
The NCSA What's New Catalog

The interesting thing about this is that you write the HTML code for your own submission. To get a very quick overview of the guidelines you should follow, visit their Web page at http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/submit-to-whats-new.html. Then you can send the appropriate e-mail to whats-new@ncsa.uiuc.edu.
The Online Whole Internet Catalog

E-mail: wic@ora.com

http://nearnet.gnn.com/wic/

Other Sites of Interest

The following list is an assortment of interesting places to check out on the Web.

Cool Site of the Day. This site contains a new hyperlink each day to an interesting or unique Web page. If you would like to be considered, send e-mail describing your site to cool@infi.net. Make sure you include your own URL. If you just want to visit an interesting Web page each day, check out

http://cool.infi.net/

Figure 14.6. The Cool Site of the Day.

Spider's Pick of the Day. This is another site that chooses a hot Web page each day.

E-mail: boba@www.com

http://gagme.wwa.com/~boba/pick.html
Inter-Links is a great catalog of all sorts of Web resources. Every Webmaster should spend some time there just to get an idea of what's available (http://www.nova.edu/Inter-Links/).
The Clearinghouse for Subject-Oriented Internet Resource Guides. This site includes lots of links to other resources and an online submission form. It's only interested in your Web site, however, if it is a free guide to other Internet resources.

http://www.lib.umich.edu/chhome.html

Newsgroups

comp.infosystems.www.announce is a newsgroup dedicated to the purpose of new Web sites coming online. Post an article here about your own site. In addition, you might want to monitor this newsgroup to see if any other sites similar to yours (shall we say, competitors) show up on the Web.

There are more than 16,000 other newsgroups on Usenet at the time of this writing, and if a discussion group is directly related to the topic of your page it is within netiquette to announce your Web site there.

Do not post advertisements to Usenet newsgroups that do not directly relate to your Web page, or the members of that group will not be happy with you.

What's Next

Now that your site is running and you've announced it all over the place, you should be ready for what comes next. You could be in for a flood of traffic. Be sure to read Chapter 16 as it is all about preparing for the growth of your site and maintaining it. Who knows, your Web site could become famous.

The next chapter discusses dozens of miscellaneous business resources on the Web that will help you to plan and expand your site.