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Free anime web templates
ERIC Hysen is a busy entrepreneur, with a small but growing business that designs Web sites for other small businesses. He's got four clients right now, which may not sound like that many, but as Eric is 14 and in the ninth grade he's got other things he has to do - - like homework.
Eric is one of the many kids who are building their own Web sites - - for all kinds of reasons. Some, like Eric, who attends Blair High School in Silver Spring, Md., are creating their own businesses. Others use their sites to further causes they support or provide help for private problems.
But most are simply me-me-me sites -- my favorite band, sports team, clothes, food and friends. They have music and photos, links to other sites their creators like. These kids are writing about what they know best -- themselves and the minutiae of their daily lives. Many such sites include guest books, so visitors can sign in and make comments about their tours of the site.
Peter Grunwald, of the Internet research firm Grunwald Associates, estimates about 2 million sites are created by kids age 6 to 17. By next year, his research indicates, there could be 6 million or more. Further, he estimates that 9 percent of kids age 9 to 12 have their own sites.
"Building sites has grown organically but not until recently did we promote and market it," says Jamie Riehle, global manager of Web publishing for Terra Lycos, one of the Internet companies promoting site-building.
Terra Lycos, by its own definition, is pioneering ways to charge for Internet services. People start with its free service, then upgrade for a charge.
The company offers two sites -- Angelfire.com and Tripod.com -- where lots of these personal sites can be found. Web builders go there for a free place to put their sites online. The only "cost" is that those sites get plastered with ads. Kids searching for an ad- free zone have to pay for space. As part of the deal, though, they get gizmos to enhance their sites.
Business is good. Between the two sites, Terra Lycos has 32 million active members -- that's up from about 1 million in the late 1990s. That high number certainly indicates a lot of interest in building sites, but being a member doesn't mean that you've actually built one.
The membership grew, Riehle says, "by word of Web." And because so many sites are so personal, says Riehle, "it's like walking into a teen's bedroom" when you go to one of their Web sites.
Angelfire is geared to the younger end of the audience -- teens and young adults -- says Riehle, and for that reason it has more complicated programming options. Younger kids would rather take the more complicated approach to Web building, he says. Tripod, for college-age and older subscribers, has more "point-and-click" options, so those who are not so comfortable with building their sites from the ground up can pick out ready-made templates and just add their own content.
"If you're 12 or 14 and you don't know HTML, your friends won't respect you," Riehle says. "There is 'a cool geek factor.' Smart is cool again."
Kids are learning HTML code to create their own sites, not necessarily an easy thing for the pencil-and-paper generation to accept. For those who have lived under an eraser for the last decade, HTML is short for "hypertext markup language," the computer coding used to create Web pages.
David Jaffe, a 15-year-old ninth-grader at the British School of Washington, put up a site on Tripod.com a couple of years ago. Tripod monitors took it down, however, for "inappropriate content," he says, although he can't figure out what they considered inappropriate. He now produces an anime cartoon site on another server, where he does the words for the strip and a friend draws the pictures. He's really interested in moviemaking, but he enjoys writing for the strip.
"I like the technology," he says. "We taught ourselves HTML. It's quite simple. It's not really a code. It's basically a bunch of lazy people abbreviating things."
Six years ago, at age 11, Lissa Daniels, of Celebration, Fla., taught herself HTML by reading the "source codes" behind the sites. Then she built her own Web site to explain HTML to other kids. Today her Web site gets 28 million page views and 5 million visitors each month. Now, at 17, Lissa has bought a car with the profits and the site is so successful that it will help fund her college education.
There are a number of places kids can go to learn how to build a Web site, including America Online's Hometown. It's geared to 13- year-olds and up, but lots of younger kids are using it, too. AOL does not have numbers for how many teenagers have created sites on Hometown, although there are 13 million total.
Now schools and camps teach HTML, and kids buy software to help them design pages. Karen Rosenbaum, who runs the TIC (Technology Is Cool) summer camp in Bethesda, Md., says teaching kids HTML is easy, so the camp also teaches sophisticated computer programming languages.
"We have a prejudice against making things too easy," she says.
Many sites are similar because "kids have similar interests," Rosenbaum says.
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