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Things To Do With A Mouse
I’ve heard that Boulder Valley is one of the most “connected” places on the planet—at least in the Internet sense. This point was confirmed for me last year at a builders’ seminar sponsored by the local Home Builders’ Association. There was a panel of five recent home buyers who agreed to field questions from builders about their home buying experience. When asked how they had chosen their builder, two of the five reported finding him on the Internet.
Before that seminar, I considered myself fairly techo-savvy. I had a modem, and used e-mail regularly. I had even helped my daughter conduct research on the Internet for school papers. But I hadn’t considered the power of the Internet as a resource for researching products and services. Once I logged-on and started searching for construction information, I was amazed at how much is available, and how easy it is to access. Instead of playing “phone tag” with vendors, and waiting days for information to arrive, I could call-up their product catalog on my computer screen, complete with color photographs, detailed dimensions and specifications, prices, and a listing of local distributors. I could even print out just the pages I needed—and do it all 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, including holidays!
I know many of you are way ahead of the curve on using the Internet. If so, you have every right to feel smug, and skip ahead to the list of Internet sites listed below. But if you’ve been thinking about test-driving your modem for the first time, I hope to inspire you to use the Internet to get the construction-related information you need, when you need it.
While it is beyond the scope of this article to provide detailed training, I will offer some basic information to get you started. If you need more comprehensive training, locate the nearest teenager. If you don’t have one, rent your neighbor’s. Teens have this figured out.
One word of caution: once you start navigating the Internet, you will have a much higher profile. Companies can tell who has visited their site, and they will notice you. In other words, you will start getting more electronic junk mail. If your Internet Service Provider (such as America Online, Microsoft Network, Prodigy, Compuserve, etc.) will allow you to have multiple names, reserve one name just for “surfing the net”. If you don’t give this name to anyone, you never need to read the mail for that screen name (address). Conversely, never log onto the Internet with a name you don’t want inundated with junk mail.
Most Internet addresses begin with http://. Since this convention is almost universal, it is usually omitted, but implied. In other words, if you see an address listed as www.ford.com, the full address is really http://www.ford.com. The prefix www stands for World Wide Web, and is also sometime omitted, but implied.
A search engine is one of the best places to begin when searching for something on the Internet. A search engine is a web site specifically designed to help you find something. There are hundreds available, but a dozen or so popular ones, including Excite, Hotbot, Altavista, and Yahoo. They can be located at: http://www.excite.com, http://www.hotbot.com, etc.. Internet addresses such as the ones just listed are also referred to as a URL (Universal Resource Locator). You can even use a search engine to search for other search engines.
The standard use of conventions on the Internet allows you to take shortcuts when searching for major companies, such as the Pella Window Company. Large companies usually have reserved their own name as part of the standard address. Often you can guess at the URL of such a company by trying http://www. followed by the company name, followed by .com. For Pella, this would yield http://www.pella.com, which is the URL of Pella’s website. Instead of .com (commercial), the URL might use .gov (government), .org (organization, usually non-profit), .edu (educational institution), . mil (military) or .net (network). Most business URLs will end with .com. If you want to reach Bill Clinton to drop him a little note, you would find him at http://www.whitehouse.gov. I’m sure he’d appreciate it.
If you are interested in general information on construction, one of the best places to start is at the website of industry trade groups or magazines. These sites usually have articles of interest to the public, as well as a listing of contractors in your area. A few of my favorites are hosted by the National Association of Home Builders (http://www.nahb.com), the National Association of the Remodeling Industry (http://www.nari.org), the National Kitchen & Bath Association (http://www.nkba.com), Remodeling Magazine (http://www.remodeling.hw.net), the Home Builders Association of Metro Denver (http://www.hbadenver.com), and the Daily Camera (http://www.bouldernews.com). All of these sites have direct connections to other sites via hyperlinks (underlined names you can “click on” to go directly to the site).
Once you find a site you may want to return to in the future, you can save it as a “bookmark” or a “favorite places”—a personal address directory of sites you want to come back to. Most browsers will allow you to set up a category of bookmarks to store related websites—Construction Sites, for example.
It is often useful to print information on your printer—a catalog of appliances, for example. You can do this by simply selecting “File” then “Print” from the menu at the top of your browser. If that doesn’t work, you may be able to select the information you want and “paste” it onto an open document in your word processor. This is also a good way to save URL addresses for later reference if you can’t use your bookmarks or favorite places. Simply copy the URL from the address banner and paste it where you need it.
If you’re not already using the Internet, abandon any excuses you have, and just do it. The power and convenience of this incredible tool is worth the small investment of your time and money. You’ll soon wonder how you got along without it.
