A home page is for the World Wide Web and is the next step in this type of electronic communication. It allows pictures to be embeded in the documents and best of all it allows hypertext links. Hypertext is sections of the text that are marked ( usually in blue) so that you can click on them and be connected to somewhere else. For example: My sons were looking for pictures of the band Nirvana. They started Netscape which is a browser for the WWW. They went to Yahoo which is an index area that has a list of topics like: Arts Education Government etc. They click on arts and that connects them to another computer that has a list of Arts pages. They click on music and get a big page with with all sorts of bands. Once they find Nirvana they click on that and go to a Nirvana Home Page. This has pictures of the band and links to download large pictures. They can click to download samples of their songs in a .wav file format. (These are big downloads) I can forsee PTG having such a page with a link for a list of RPTs. Once you get that you get a list of clickable states and find yours. You then get a list of RPTs and their phone numbers. There can be a link for technical info which would get you the Brochures and bulletins that we have now. I'm thinking so far of customers searching this page. We could have back issues of Journals available but that would be a big project although we have someone working on that now. That resource might be better distributed on disk than online. I could forsee links to piano manufacturers that have home pages. The beauty of this system is that you can add a whole category of information to you page by just putting a pointer to someone else's page that it already set up. There would be links to music resource pages which already exist. The WWW and browsers such as Mosaic and Netscape allow you to point and click your way through the internet. Home pages can deal with text, pictures, sound, video, can access gophers, ftp sites, and e-mail. They can even have forms for user input to search databases. This project would take some doing. It is easier now that I found an add on for Microsoft word to write hypertext pages. The PTG Board has concerns about how much and what information we put out to the world. Many of them don't understand what this sort of communication is about, so there is some education to do. You have to have full internet connection and a browser such as Mosaic or Netscape both of which are available on the net for free. Even a 14400 modem is a bit slow for pages with many graphics. I apologize for the long winded description. Start reading PC magazine or any such magazine and almost every issue will have something about WWW. Ron Ron Berry ronberry@iquest.net Collect 1000 of these signatures and win a free trip to Cyberspace!!
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