Quite how mum will take to little Johnny tying up the family phone for an hour or two in the evening remains to be seen.As well as the old favourites, E-On will offer a specially commissioned range of multi-player games. Players will be able to log on to a game, invite others on the channel to join in and enjoy the fun. Titles available at launch will include the 3D tank simulator Tank Warrior, a 3D role-playing game, Realm 3D, L5 Assault, Magic Realm and a games room featuring more traditional games such as chess, poker, blackjack and draughts.E-On will also offer a “Digital Shop” that will sell entertainment software, CDs and videos direct to the home. Customers will be able to make a selection, input a small amount of information and simply push a button to complete the order. The system will use secure methods to pass on credit card details and goods will be distributed in the normal way.E-On is due to launch next month. It will cost pounds 8 plus VAT per month, but if your Internet service provider has signed up as an E-On “distributor”, it will cost pounds 5.

For more information, see http:// www.e-on .. The World Wide Web contains a wealth of information, but, for most of us, surfing it is a passive experience. Most “home pages” are produced by professional designers, college students and hobbyists. Web pages are designed using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a programming code for layout that all Web browsing software can understand. The disadvantage is that although HTML is simple for a computer language, programmers must learn strings of cumbersome codes. The explosion of interest in the Internet, however, has prompted software companies to produce utilities that allow the non-expert to produce decent- looking Web pages without having to learn HTML.
The most popular wordprocessors and desktop publishing packages now have some support for writing Web pages; ClarisWorks, Pagemaker, WordPerfect and Microsoft Word all include HTML. With this in mind, I decided it was time to write my own home pages.My Internet service, in common with many others, gives away 500k of “free” World Wide Web space on its servers.

It also divides home pages into business and personal categories. I decided that it would be more useful (and less egotistical) to use my pages to promote my business as a writer and photographer.The next step was to choose an HTML editor. There are a number of free or shareware programs that can write Web pages, but I opted for Adobe’s PageMill, a stand-alone commercial package. This is from the same stable as Photoshop, which I would be using to process the graphics for my site.PageMill is a small program, taking up just 1.6Mb on my hard disk. It needs 3Mb of main memory (RAM), so it runs quite happily alongside Photoshop on a computer with 16Mb of RAM. Had I opted to use either Word or Pagemaker, I could not have used both packages side by side. It is also fully “wysiwig” (what you see is what you get), and pictures can be dragged straight on to PageMill pages from a Photoshop window.The hardest part of designing a Web site, I quickly discovered, was not the computing but deciding on the contents and the structure.

Files need to be small, so that visitors can move through the site quickly. Putting everything I wanted on the site would make it extremely slow, and more than a little messy.Perhaps the best piece of advice in the PageMill manual is to sketch out an outline for the Web pages on paper first. Another worthwhile exercise is to browse the Web, and see how other sites work. The best make good use of links, which allow browsers to jump from page to page at the click of the mouse. The worst – and this includes some commercial sites – are seemingly interminable lists, with little order or logic to them.My site is divided into distinct sections that link into one common title page.