Datasheet

Crowder c01.tex V3 - 05/26/2008 7:16pm Page 17
The Basics of Building Web Pages and Sites 1
The Daily Kos political blog, for example, provides much needed clarification about the confusing
political situation within the Democratic party and the state of our nation at
www.dailykos.com.
Search engines, on the other hand, are a perfect example of the kind of gray area discussed earlier,
where it’s difficult to slot many of them into one category. The vast majority of them are com-
mercial operations designed to generate advertising revenue. Some of them even rank the results
by how much they’re paid instead of by true relevance. But the only interest that Web surfers
have in them is to find information. The same is true of news sites.
Another type of informational site is one that offers a limited amount of information at no charge
but that provides a greater amount for a fee. Spanish Learning Resources (
www.studyspanish
.com
) is a prime example of this. The site, shown in Figure 1-7, provides about as much training
as you would get in a typical first-year Spanish language course for free. If you simply need to
understand such niceties as why ser and estar both mean ‘‘to be’’ or need a basic grasp of Spanish
vocabulary and grammar, visit this site at
www.studyspanish.com. (You should still pick up a
copy of Spanish for Dummies, though — you never know when your Internet connection might
go down.)
FIGURE 1-6
Political blogs can increase public awareness on civic concerns.
17