RETIREMENT 101

TO WEBPAGE START

Free Web Sites

Personal Security
I firmly believe that anyone developing a website for their personal use must put into place as much security as possible. You want the website to be available to friends and family, but not to the nuts that surf the web looking for opportunities to sell you something, or worse.

If this seems like a paranoid behavior, it is. I value my personal privacy very much and do not want any violation, if at all possible. You may not feel as strong about this as I do, but "you have been warned".

General
In general, there are numerous sources for web sites. Some are free, some cost $20 per month and others up to $150 per month. I found references to free sites by going to http://www.microsoftwpp.com/wppsearch and going to the broad list of Service providers. I then put in a service criteria of Free Hosting and Personal Web Site. This gave me four web page providers including Tripod and Freeweb. You can put in your own criteria and get an up to date list of service providers.

Tripod
Tripod is owned by Lycos and gives web sites free. They justifty this by putting advertizing on various pages on your site. Thankfully, the advertizing is not too objectionable so that it doesn't interfere too much.

The terms of the deal are that you get 11 Megs of server memory for free. In order to use more than that, you can pay about $20 per month and can have site of 21 Megs.

For our discussion, I will assume you are interested in the FREE SITE.

Here is how to get the site.

• e-mail address You must have an e-mail address before you can get a tripod web site. I strongly suggest you get a free e-mail address from msn hotmail and use it for all correspondence to and from the web site. This insures a level of privacy and minimizes crank messages from getting into your "family e-mail". To get this free e-mail address, go to http://www.msn.com and just follow instructions for getting a new, free e-mail address.

  You can use a pseudonym in registering for the free e-mail to add another level of security to the site interaction.

• Tripod sign up To get the tripod site, you must register with information about yourself. I suggest you use the same pseudonym here, as for the hotmail signup. The URL is:
  http://tripod.com
  When you are finished, your site will have a URL of
  https://members.tripod.com/yourname
  where "yourname" is the member name that you registered under.
• Home Page After you get your website, the first thing you must do is establish your home page. This page must. be named index.htm. When the site is opened, the viewer goes to this page first. All subsequent pages must be referenced from this page or some other page on the web site.