Brian Whitaker looks at ways to get rich on the Net, so far without success

The Guardian, 25 June, 1998

AS CHAIRMAN of the Yemen Gateway Web site, it gives me great pleasure to present our interim report and accounts: Internet subscription £126.76; book on HTML £13.99; phone calls £35 (est); coffee and midnight oil £7.89. Total expenditure: £183.64. Total income: nil.

If I were running a Japanese bank, a net loss of £183.64 would be very good news indeed. But I'm not, so I'm trying to recoup my multi-pound investment by selling books and records over the Internet.

Yemen Gateway has become an "associate" ofamazon.com, the American Internet bookseller. To earn money, you direct customers to Amazon, which pays 5 per cent commission on sales attributable to your site, or 15 per cent if you link to specific books in Amazon's database of three million titles.

Even with get-rich-slow schemes like these, there are snags. One is that most of the books about Yemen are out of print, though there are some CDs of Yemeni music which I'm sure will sound wonderful after a few hours chewing qat (legal, but not included in the price). Another is that you get no money at all until they owe you $100. To keep track, Amazon e-mails a weekly report showing which titles have scored hits. Already several visitors to my site have been tempted, though they stopped short of actually buying. Still, I'm looking forward to the day when an entire student class needs Brill's Dictionary of Post-Classical Yemeni Arabic at $123.50 a copy.

In anticipation, I've spent a further £286.71 acquiring a customised domain name - arranged through my Internet service provider. Because of the site's international content I wanted to avoid a "co.uk" suffix. I tried "org" but was told this is only for non-profit organisations (which are not to be confused with loss-making ones).

I had imagined "com" was reserved for large corporations, but apparently not, so I settled for "www.al-bab.com' (bab is Arabic for "door" or, in this case, "gateway"). Not mentioning Yemen in the name allows for possible development of other Middle Eastern "gateway" sites at the same address.

Registration and set-up took a couple of days. I expected to have to transfer all my Web files to the new address and was surprised to find, on trying out the new domain name, that they were already there.

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FASHION can be a cruel thing. Last week, my site was obliged to cast off its flared trousers, as it were, in public. This week the problem is frames - the technique that divides a Web page into panels that can be scrolled separately.

A couple of years ago, all the cutting-edge sites used frames, not least because they allowed the avant-garde to assert its superiority over the millions of wretched souls still using browsers that could not cope with them. But now that browsers have caught up, frames are terribly passé - and, as you'd expect, my site uses them in abundance, to the disgust of several readers. Members of the Frames Abolition Society are welcome to re-work my home page without them. I'll happily post the results on the Web for the world to judge.

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