Web site-seeing

Scott Dickensheets

Tuesday, May 14, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

You have to feel bad for Stormy. "I used to run this place until those Bean boys appeared," the Bean family cat reports on the Bean family's World Wide Web page on the Internet. Then the twins were born. "Now all I hear is 'Get off the baby.'"

What's remarkable about Stormy's lament is not just that a cat can access the Internet despite having no opposable thumbs, but that her mews of protest are easily available to America's mouse-wielding millions. Not so long ago, disgruntled house pets who wanted to get their stories out had to buttonhole a reporter and hope for the best.

Thanks to what some call the Internet Revolution, every Tom, Dick and Stormy can bypass traditional media and put their two chips in on practically any subject. All you need is a few megabytes on someone's server (think of a server as the host of your Web page; several companies offer server service) and, for fancier design stuff, some easy-to-use software.

"It was just one of those hot new things," says Tom Bean, the real power behind the "Bean Family Homepage." Careful readers may remember Bean as the subject of a recent story about how he and his wife conceived twins using cutting-edge fertility techniques. It was that event, in part, that nudged him into cyberspace.

The site, up for almost a year, chronicles the kids' progress from "eight-celled embryos" to the grinning tykes now pictured on the home page. Click on "two weeks," for instance, and there they are, George and Carl, all eight cells of each of them. "Which do you think looks more like me?" Bean wonders.

Alas, as the little meter that records the number of visitors to the site makes clear, not a lot of people are stopping by: As of press time, the number stood at 44.

But that's hardly surprising; it's a tangled Web out there, after all.

Among the sea of Internet sites is a vast archipelago of pages either originating in or dedicated to Las Vegas. The city, county and North Las Vegas have them, as does UNLV. Those sites offer job listings (UNLV needs an archaeologist!) and information on official services.

In addition, the Official Las Vegas Internet Yellow Pages (maintained by the Internet access provider InterMind) contains a slew of sites in every category, from advertising and apartments to gaming and golfing to radio and real estate. Even the SUN has a Web site.

Unless you're not an out-of-work archaeologist or in need of an apartment, more interesting is the rabbit-scurry of small, personal Web sites in which people of every quirk and persuasion participate in the great democratic urge to be heard.

"It was a nice way to get published," says Joe Leavitt, proprietor of "Joe's World." "There was this Internet revolution going on, and this was the easiest way to be part of it."

"Joe's World" is typical of personal Web sites (also called home pages). It offers personal details on Leavitt himself -- he's 23; his shoe size is 16 -- with a promise of more to come, including info on his "Pepsi collection." Like most sites, "Joe's World" offers point-and-click links to other Web sites Leavitt fancies.

Or there's "Frank's Home Page." Not only does Frank offer his "food picks of the week" -- breakfast at Bagel Oasis, lunch at Montesano's Italian Deli, Dinner at Chicago Joe's -- along with weather and "cool maps," he provides a nifty gripe page. Visitors can sound off about, for instance, the way some people mispronounce Sirius Avenue as "cy-rus," or the way other people make one word of "a lot." And should you be considering a trip to Bishop, Calif., well, Frank thoughtfully provides info on his aunt's bed-and-breakfast joint there.

"Glenn's Las Vegas Page" offers Vegasy news bites, travel tips and a helpful listing of things for kids to do in Las Vegas.

Say it's oddball you want. Check out "Another Homepage. Terrip's," which gathers under one electronic roof a variety of wacky personal pages -- including "Sagetta Does the Web," in which a photo of a barely dressed woman is paired, inexplicably, with an explanation of St. Patrick's Day.

Not all Las Vegas sites are put up by Las Vegans. "Grizzer and Goose Man's Las Vegas Adventure" is the Webchild of two high-spirited guys from Milwaukee who took a spontaneous trip to Las Vegas a few months ago.

Why make a home page of it? "I wanted to be a geek," explains Grizzer via e-mail. "I am not a programmer, and the ease of creating a Web page made it of interest to me." While the page doesn't give you the gonzo sleaze-crawl suggested by the title, it does offer a few tourist-friendly tips on doing Vegas the Grizzer and Goose Man way.

There's a definite kick in having your thoughts out there for anyone to access. "You just kinda feel good when people interact with your site," Leavitt says. "It gives a good amount of satisfaction, especially when they tell you how much they liked it."

Writes Grizzer: "One of my intentions was that my page would get responses from singles looking for something to do. I have only received inquiries about what to see and do, and what are the best strip clubs."

Not every Web site is a ploy to meet single women or a monument to its creator's sense of his own interestingness. Diane Chambers created her "Sole Mothers International" home page as a resource for single parents.

"From visiting sites on the Internet and having conversations with people by e-mail, I realized there's not a lot out there for single moms," says the Las Vegas resident. "And most of what's out there tends toward chat rooms."

Chambers set up "Sole Mothers" as a clearinghouse of parenting information and a forum to discuss the problems of single momhood with experts. She updates it weekly.

Las Vegan Brian Saliba doesn't have to update his site very often -- it's just his resume. He's looking for a job in publicity or entertainment and figured an online "Position Wanted" site might do the trick.

It hasn't. While "it's very convenient for (prospective employers) to pull it up and print it out," he says, he hasn't landed a job.

Still, Saliba is an example of how easy it is to set up your own Web page these days. No techno-nerd, he mastered the software in a day.

Leavitt, who spends about seven hours a week keeping his site and its links updated -- "a well-run Web site takes a lot of maintenance" -- also found the software easy to handle. So easy, in fact, that he's going into the business himself.

He's just formed a company, Liquid Imaging, to create and maintain Web sites. He had four clients before he had all the necessary phone lines installed.

"I enjoyed (assembling 'Joe's World') so much, I thought, 'This is the thing for me.'"

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