Special-Interest Homepage Providers: Part I

Dateline: 05/26/97 - Weekly feature from your Guide.

What do rock bands, sci-fi writers, and chefs have in common? They all can enjoy free homepages courtesy of webspace providers who target specific professional groups. You might qualify, too, although watch out for strings attached.

Most Web users associate the idea of free homepages with GeoCities, Angelfire, and Tripod, who together host nearly 1 million such pages. Why would anyone set up a homepage anywhere else, considering the free tools, and, especially in the case of GeoCities, the promotion opportunities offered by the Big Three?

Jim Macdonald is webmaster of SFF Net, which offers free homepages to professional sci-fi, romance, mystery, and other "genre" writers. He says the writers choose SFF Net because of the close sense of community: "We have a focus, and a unifying ideal. Another reason is that we don't limit content or force you to run ads."

I'd agree that while both Tripod and GeoCities have developed a community feel, it's by necessity a different kind from that an SFF Net, with its sharply delineated group of 300 pages, can offer. Also, let's not forget that GeoCities, et al., are focused on personal homepages, not professional outposts.

"Glorified" Listing Service?

But SFF Net is something of an anomaly. Most of the special-interest, free-page providers I found are not interested in helping professionals congregrate with their peers but rather in creating a mall-type environment for purely commercial ends. And most do have rules about what you can do with the space.

That's the case with Pastry Wiz, which bills itself as a free "showcase" for food professionals. Rather than your own "site" per se, you're allotted a page within a specific section of the Pastry Wiz site (on which you cannot sell ads). Some chefs and food consultants use their Pastry Wiz space as a way to test the Web waters without a full-fledged commitment, while others use it to direct traffic to their real sites hosted elsewhere.

Internet Rockhouse USA, which provides free pages to musicians and bands, is more freewheeling, though most of the band pages I browsed were extremely simplistic or pointers to "official" sites elsewhere. Its free-homepage offer functions as a glorified listing service, though it appears to be a valuable one to the bands themselves. A similar service is provided to Atlanta-based bands (ever heard of Kathleen Turner Overdrive?) by Virtual Atlanta.

Fine Print

Some offers of free pages aren't as clear cut as they seem at first. 123 Go Global provides free pages to commercial web designers. But if you set up shop here, you must promise to use the hosting services of Go Global's parent company when creating client sites. I don't know about you, but it would trouble me to find out my designer was recommending a presence provider because that provider supplied him or her with a free site.

USA Online wants a signed contract before it will provide free space to Web artists and programmers "with innovative ideas (functional, aesthetic, or both)." Read the fine print here: "Free" means at least a $25 dollar set-up fee and the deal only lasts for 90 days. Another service I found, ACCNET, offers 500KB of free space for licensed real-estate agents, but did not respond to my emails.

Upshot: If you're a professional, a free page offer can be a useful stepping stone to setting up a more detailed site or a way to direct traffic to your existing website. But don't expect a community a la SFF Net, and watch out for those strings!

Part II will focus on homepage providers who target geography, age, personal philosophy/political stance, and worthy causes as the "qualifications" for free webspace.