Brian Whitaker gets to grips with the strange world of GIFs and tags

The Guardian, 14 May, 1998

I HAVE resolved to become a media baron with a global publishing empire stretching all the way to Yemen. Please don’t mock. Most people know next to nothing about Yemen, though it’s a place with amazing landscapes and architecture, a rich history, a fascinating culture and byzantine politics.

Reliable information about the country is hard to find and the people who want it are scattered around the world. This makes it an ideal subject for the Internet. There are already a few Yemeni Web sites; most look very pretty if you’re prepared to wait a while, but there’s not much substance.

Perhaps I can fill the gap. Over the past few years, I have written some 60 articles about Yemen and have almost completed a book on Yemeni politics. Along the way, I’ve collected dozens of official and unofficial documents and converted the more interesting English-language ones into Word files.

Only a few service providers support my new super-fast X2 modem. One of these, NetDirect, offers 25Mb of free Web space — far more than the average. Signing up costs £107.88 for a year, though I’m unprepared when the woman asks me for a user name. “Brian . . . er . . .”

“Dot-W?” she suggests. So that’s it, then. When the peerage comes I’ll be Lord.W @ ndirect.

I have laid down two cardinal rules for the Web site:

Rule 1: Content is king. I want the site to look meaty and authoritative. No decorative backgrounds, bells, whistles or animated Gifs (images) — just simple but professional-looking pages with clear typography. In my case this is a necessity because I have a lot of text to turn into hypertext markup language (html), the language of the Web, and couldn’t produce a bell or whistle even if I wanted to.

Rule 2: Accessibility. Long trails of links drive people mad. Real meat should be no more than three mouse-clicks away. To achieve this, I’m splitting the screen into two frames, or panels. On the left is a small navigational frame — always visible — with links to all sections. Clicking on these links calls up a section menu in the main right-hand frame with direct links to my own content and external Web sites.

Constructing the site is easier than I imagined. About 70 per cent of the work is planning and psychology — working out how people will want to navigate the site.

If necessary, Word 97, for instance, will create Web pages automatically, but a would-be new media baron really ought to know a bit about how HTML works. The price of books on HTML is shocking, so I settled for a cheap one at £13.99 — Tim Evans’s Ten Minute Guide (more like 10 hours, actually). Alternatively, a Web search for “html guide” will locate most of the information you need free of charge.

Basic HTML is quite simple. Apart from header information, you need learn only three tags —

,

— to create a paragraphed page with a headline. Within a month, I have about 180 files of my own and 100 links to other points on the Internet. That’s a substantial Web site, and it’s time to go live.

I still can’t think of a name for the site. I have toyed with “Yemeni Studies Network”, which sounds authoritative but too earnest. As I gaze at the computer my eye fixes on the manufacturer’s label: Gateway 2000. Mmm. How about “Yemen Gateway”? It translates into Arabic as “Bab al-Yemen” which happens to be the name of the most famous landmark in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a.

I load up the FTP (file transfer protocol) software and send Yemen Gateway off to the Webserver. I log off, switch to my browser and dial up again. Yes, it’s there. The home page looks fine but — oh **!?* — half the files are missing . . .

© Copyright Guardian Newspapers Ltd 1998