HOMEPAGE CHOICES

In addition to actually having your home page on our site, we can list you here and put in links to your home page wherever it is. This applies to your guide listing as well.

There are four main ways you can have a home page on the World Wide Web. These include:

1) The Best and Most Expensive: Register your Domain Name with InterNIC ($100.00) and purchase a Pentium Server, Server Software, a T1 leased line, a router and lots of other things to have your very own web site. Cost, not including labor, at least $8,000 plus costs of $250.00+ per month for the T1 and $850 mo. for the T1 port at an Internet Service Provider. Labor --- if you don't do it yourself --- you don't even want to hear about.

2) The Next Best and Still Expensive: Register your Domain Name with InterNIC ($100.00) and pay an Internet provider ($100 to $1,000 typical setup plus monthly fees) to establish a virtual domain for you and maintain your own site on a server. GLINN also offer virtual domains. You have your own site with your own domain name on one of our web servers. GLINN charges as little as $9.95 per month with a $25.00 setup fee. Even large sites can be as low as a $50 setup fee and an average of $50.00 per month. This is better than Wisconsin's largest and best internet providers.

3) The Cheap Route: Just get an Internet account that gives you a free homepage, like on Exec-PC, America OnLine, Netcom or whatever. Cheap, but full of problems if you want any sort of exposure, if you want to be searchable, or if you want to promote the page. You can sign up with GLINN Network One as your dialup internet provider too, and get a free home page. Plus we are better and cheaper than Exec-PC.

4) The GLINN Approach: Economical plus many advantages over any other approach or using other service providers.

GLINN'S ADVANTAGES-
Making use of GLINN has many advantages over putting your home page on another site, or not having it listed here. These include:

1) YOUR URL/PAGE NAME: Free home pages and other arrangements where you do not have a Domain Name of your own, puts you way down in a directory structure. Your URL (Uniform Resource Locator) will be L O N G . . . . . . No one is likely to remember it, and few people are likely to sit down and type it into their browser unless they are really really interested. If you have a page on a university site, such as UWM, a visitor looking for your page would have to go through a number of levels of menus and listings. On GLINN you will have a relatively simple and clean address:
www.glinn.com/guide/yourpage.htm

If you want to have more than a home page, we will also offer virtual domains where you can use your own domain name on our site. We can put you on a Linux server running Apache or for a slightly higher cost, on a Windows NT Server running Microsoft IIS. All of our servers and other equipment are in our offices in downtown Milwaukee.

Short of having a domain, which involves getting a domain name from InterNIC ($100.00), if you want to have a large number of pages/graphics, etc. we can provide you with your own directory, and you don't need to have a page listed in the URL. With your own directory, your top page wold be index.htm which every browser would automatically go to. Example URL:
www.glinn.com/yoursite

This means you have your own directory in our ROOT Directory, not two or more levels deep. Few sites will do this, and no freebie home page provider will. Your address is short and clean, easy to remember, and easy to print in ads, on cards, etc.

2) GETTING ON THE SEARCH ENGNES: Free home pages are often in directories that are blocked to the robot search engines. This means, even if you go to the trouble of submitting your URL to Yahoo, Lycos, Alta Vista, Excite, and the dozens of other major search engines on the Internet, your page will never be listed because the site administrator has a line in the directory security file that blocks all robot searches. Robot engines used by the search sites can play havoc in big sites, especially databases. They also can take up huge amounts of bandwidth and bring a server to its knees. Businesses that are offering Internet access and throw in a free home page, don't want search engine robots slowing down the response time for all their customers just so you can have your home page listed in Yahoo. If you are on AOL, CIS, or Prodigy with a home page, the search robots don't get past the front door.

This means that your home page will not turn up in any search using any search engine. As far as the overall web is concerned, you do not exist.

GLINN on the other hand, is listed in all the search engines and has been since July of 1996. And because GLINN has so many pages, it comes up near the top of searches using virtually any gay/lesbian related word. Your home page, even if searchable, is likely to be entry 10,000 or so. Do a search for "gay" on Alta Vista and you'll get 100,000 hits or more. Do a search for Wisconsin or Milwaukee, and you'll get hundreds if not thousands. GLINN comes up within the first few pages. With your page here, when the search engine robots come they will find your listings on our pages, plus your own home page. In addition to the big general search engines, we are also listed in all the gay search engines plus many specialized search engines and directory lists.

3) EXPOSURE: If you have a free homepage, it is likely no one will find you by accident. You will have to promote the site and only those people learning about your site directly are likely to visit it. If you need to use a free home page, such as an organization using a page of one of their members, chances are there isn't much money to promote its existence. The page is not going to get much exposure or many visitors.

If you have a home page and are using it for a gay/lesbian organization you belong to, you aren't going to get national gay/lesbian organizations to put links to your page from their own links page. Links on other pages is a major way to get visitors, and links on major sites is the best way to get people to visit your site. Even if you go to the trouble of asking, you will generally be ignored. Few places want to bother with a personal home page that can be here today and gone tomorrow. With a domain name (such as glinn.com) a site can move anywhere and still be found with any old link.

GLINN is a major site. We are not ignored. We have links on the pages of many national gay/lesbian organizations, plus many other web sites. GLINN is listed on the links page of the Human Rights Campaign, for example. GLINN is a winner of the Rainbow Award for October 1996 for outstanding gay/lesbian web sites. Our name listed in the honor roll at their site, for example, brings in visitors that will never be able to find your home page as easily if it were elsewhere. We also offer live chat and other services that link to other gay/lesbian sites and bring in visitors to our site. GLINN has so much content people visit it for a wide variety of reasons. Our adult site (gayadult.com), with 245,000 visitors in its first 9 months, also brings visitors to our main site. GLINN owns and/or operates 12 different web sites (as of November 30, 1997) and all these sites are linked together, generating significant traffic. GLINN has many easy to remember and valuable gay domain names including, among others, "gayadult.com", "gayhome.com", "gayglobe.com", "gaycards.com", and "gaystore.com".

Even if a visitor is not looking for your home page specifically, once they log into GLINN and see everything that is here, many visitors will end up viewing your home page. If it is off somewhere else, none of our visitors will have a chance to see it. A home page will not do you, your business or your organization much good if people can not find it easily.

4) COUNTERS: If a site doesn't have a counter, chances are they are ashamed of the lack of visitors. Also, look out for unlabeled counters. Anyone can create a CGI scripted counter on a page. Every access is counted, even if a person such as the owner is just clicking back and forth between different pages. They can also edit the number to be anything they like. These counters are often total fantasy. The counter on the GLINN index page is operated by WebCounter. This number, the number of hits, is not on our site. When the index page is loaded, the page goes to WebCounter and retrieves the number. It is impossible for us to change it or have any effect on it. In addition, multiple accesses from the same address are not counted. If we logged into our site repeatedly, as we admittedly do when we are working on it, a CGI counter would count each access, while WebCounter counts the first one only and ignores all the others. Our counter, unlike many others is honest. However, the actual number of visitors is much higher because many services such as AOL use the same IP address for large numbers of users and these "hits" are ignored by the counter because they are coming from the same IP. We also have, for example, many visitors using WebTV devices and the counter ignores these as they all use the same IP.

If you want to see what the site is really doing in hits, what pages are getting viewed, the bytes transferred, the types of domains accessing the site, and the countries that are accessing the site, click on Site Statistics. This is generated by the server automatically. You will have to use your browser BACK button to get back to this page. You can use this statistics page to see exactly how much access your own pages are getting.

5) SPEED: Is your page going to be on some over-loaded server? Free home pages are an afterthought for most ISP's and their access users are tying up the bandwidth most of the time. GLINN's site is on a dedicated web server, with only a few domains on it, of which GLINN is the largest. Our adult site is on its own separate server so it does not compete with this site. Our GLINN Internet Services BBS and the home pages on that site are also on their own separate server. This site is linked with a T1 high-speed digital circuit directly to the National Access Point (NAP) of the Internet backbone in Chicago.

6) RELIABILITY: The GLINN site is on a very reliable server. It has not been down since we created this site. We have 8 years of experience running a big computer bulletin board system and know what not to do. All GLINN sites are housed within our offices on our own Pentium servers. As of Aug. 30, 1997 we have 3 web servers on our network, plus two CD-ROM servers and other support systems. We run both Windows NT and Linux servers. All servers are protected by Uninterruptible Power Supplies.

7) PAGE CREATION -- DOING IT RIGHT: GLINN will assist you in the creation of your home page, or we will do it for you. You can also create your own or have some creative types do it. Unlike Internet providers who offer home pages simply as an afterthought to their main business of selling Internet access, GLINN will make sure that the page is done right. One gay organization's home page on another site didn't have a TITLE or meta-description on the page and was virtually invisible to search engines. Search engines look for titles and meta-descriptions.... things many do-it-yourself home pagers know nothing about.

GLINN also uses standard uniform buttons at the top and bottom of the page to make navigation in our site easy. Search engines index all pages and a visitor could come into the site on any page. If that page does not have buttons to allow the visitor to move around the site, they will see that one page and leave. They will never be able to reach the other pages in the site. Even some professionally done sites are guilty of this. Those sorts of pages are "LOST IN SPACE." Of course, on the free home pages, there is no other place to go. A couple of gay sites in Wisconsin have made this mistake.

GLINN is Wisconsin's only gay web site, gay owned and operated, that offers home pages and other interactive services.

We also offer home pages on our GLINN Internet Services BBS free to all customers of our internet service business. These are on our GLINN.NET domain. Home pages are also available on our world-wide site, GAYGLOBE.COM.

In addition, here in our HOME PAGE listing, the Next Button will automatically allow a visitor to go from one home page to the next, to the next, without returning to this menu of selections. The Previous Button will let them move through the home pages backwards. The Up Button will return them to the main guide page and the Home Button to the main page.

In addition, if your home page is on our site, we will provide a link from any news articles contained on our site to your home page.

We may not have the prettiest pages on this site, but they are all competently done, they all work, and they don't take tons of bandwidth and time to download. Many sites have pretty graphics that are very slow to download, but if you've seen them once, that is usually enough, and every additional visit is a pain and waste of time waiting for the graphics you have already seen. We try to strike a balance between appearance and bandwidth requirements.

8. KEEPING IT IN THE COMMUNITY: GLINN wants you to make your decision based on quality, but all other factors being equal, spend your money where it will be appreciated and do the most good. GLINN is gay owned and operated. We have been around since 1986 providing services for the gay/lesbian community here in Milwaukee, WI. Since 1988 we have operated a computer bulletin board system and since 1990 a free community voice mail system. We have a track record of reliable service and stability, including 5 years providing production and technical services to In Step Magazine and eight years with Wisconsin Light. Take a look at the section ALL ABOUT GLINN for more information. We spend money in the community and take part in community events. Your support of this site helps us to operate the site and the services we provide here, such as our news service. No commercial web site is putting as much back into the community as GLINN. Our GLINN Network One internet service provider business directly returns ten percent or more of gross revenue directly to the lesbigay community.

HOME PAGES ON GLINN
Rates include the creation of a standard home page (one hour of labor). Home Page Rates: Businesses: $95.00 per year. Non-Profit Organizations: $75.00 per year. Individuals: $35.00 per year. (Note: Individual pages can not be used to promote businesses or organizations within the state of Wisconsin.) No labor is included in the Individual home page charge. Labor Rate for complicated home pages: $35.00 per hour. (This is less than half what most web site developers charge.)

DIRECT SERVER ACCESS
Our prices are based upon relatively simple setups. If you do your own pages, simply file attach them to email sent to info@glinn.com. They will be posted within 12 hours (or less). If you need to update your pages and have them online immediately and/or you want to have a shorter address (url), we will provide you with your own password protected file directory. You will be able to FTP your files directly into your own directory on our site. To set up the directory and access controls there is a one time charge of $25.00. You can use any access provider and run WIN_FTP or a similar program to upload files to your directory.

For information on listings, enhanced listings, active links, banner ads, virtual domains and special services, see our Rate Page. To learn more, call our office at (414) 289-8640.

www.glinn.com Copyright © 1997 by GLINN Media Corporation