My husband is a musician and his band wanted to set up a web site.  Seemed simple enough.  I had Netscape Composer – professional edition – this should be a breeze.  Wrong again.  But I made my first page.  At least I managed to type the band's name correctly.  Well, that's nice … now what?

Didn't take me long to figure out that I had better start looking at sites that weren't strictly for business.  I needed a button with 'NEXT' on it.  Never mind how to link the pages – I just had to figure out how to even get to the bottom of the page so there would be a next page to link to.  Pretty bleak with no little icons or pictures. Okay – how do I get some of those?

Fortunately, one of my son's friends had set up a web site at Angelfire and that's where my first experiment began.  Angelfire had its own little tool chest of graphics that I could choose from.  Being new to this whole thing, they all looked wonderful and I immediately wanted to use almost every one of them.  Very impractical – most had nothing to do with the band or music.  That forced me to start looking outside of their site and venture into some of the links they provided to other free graphics.  Somewhere along the way, I stumbled onto The Widow's Web.  How Mary Broussard’s elegant and informative site ever came to be listed amongst all those other ordinary sites is, as far as I'm concerned, nothing short of a miracle.  And in that one moment, my concept of the Internet was forever changed.

This site began merely as a couple of pages to allow me to experiment with different ideas prior to using them on the band’s web site.  It was never intended for “public consumption”, but I got caught up in the art out there.  As I detailed my wanderings to friends, they increasingly asked me for the web site addresses to these wonderful displays.  And so the site evolved, from merely an index to the artists’ sites, to reviews, to a place where potential clients could view samples of my work.

How the Internet has changed over the years!  When I placed my first pages on line, everyone was so open and eager to share their knowledge.  As quickly as one learned a new technique, it was posted on some web site for all to benefit.  Today, codes are hidden for fear of theft, email addresses are harvested, and the pure joy of creating has given way to capitalism.  There are so many pop-up ads and windows on some sites that by the time you close them all down - if you can do so without crashing your browser - you’ve forgotten why you came to that site in the first place.  Viruses, spam, browser hi-jacking, malicious code, denial-of-service attacks … it's time for us to reclaim the internet.