TOP TEN WEBSITES

This might not actually be the ten websites that I visit most frequently, but alongside the BBC, Amazon, Dooyoo and Ciao I have tried to include two or three lesser known websites that might be of interest to certain people. Some a little arty that won't appeal to everyone, and one that is basically for students of English. Apologies for quite a long review, but you can just pick and choose the sites you would like to read about.

JACQUIE LAWSON E-CARDS
http://www.jacquielawson.com/
I originally found out about this website through a review on Ciao a couple of years ago. I do occasionally send e-cards but had been lamenting the quality of the ones that were available free of charge. The Jacquie Lawson website currently charges £6.25 for one year's membership or £9.50 for two years, and during the course of your membership you can send any number of cards that are or that become available to any number of recipients. They are worth paying for as far as I am concerned. Almost all are interactive, and many but not all of them revolve around a certain canine character who goes by the name of Chudleigh. You can of course preview the cards and add your own personal message. An email will be sent to you when the card has been forwarded to the recipient, and you can also choose to be notified when they view the card. Throughout the period of your membership the site will email you whenever a new card is added to the collection.

If you want to save money on greetings card and save on paper for the sake of the environment, particularly over the festive season, I would recommend having a look at Jacquie Lawson's cards.

BBC NEWS
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
I do quite often watch BBC News 24, but sometimes I just don't want the noise of the television or there is a headline that doesn't interest me in the slightest but will receive a lot of attention. I actually have the BBC Weather page bookmarked so that I can look at the five-day local forecast before clicking through to the front-page news. I can then choose stories that interest me and read about them in more detail as I please. There are of course video clips to watch as well - not something I often indulge in, although when the Rothko exhibition opened recently at Tate Modern I did appreciate being able to watch the report on it as it was intrinsically visual by nature. I can only think of one occasion when it has failed me: a few weeks ago the side of a mountain collapsed on the outskirts of Cairo and I could not find an update on the story the day after reading the initial article. I believe I had to go to the Independent's website to find it, having first tried the Times and the Guardian as well. Surprising, since there were a number of fatalities.

THE DAILY MASH
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/
One of my sons recently suggested I take a look at this website for a lighthearted look at the news. This is an irreverent online newspaper, not recommended to those who are easily offended. Recent article headlines include such gems as 'Everything to be really cheap but you'll have no money anyway, say experts', or 'Call for increase in gap-toothed in-breds'. These are fairly tame examples - others have language which I had better not try to repeat here. So, if the daily news is getting you down, have a read of The Daily Mash instead.

THE ILLUSTRATION CUPBOARD
http://www.illustrationcupboard.com/default_flash.aspx
This is a website that I discovered only recently thanks to an acquaintance who knew of my interest in children's books and their illustrators. Described as 'the specialist in contemporary book art', The Illustration Cupboard is actually a London gallery that exhibits artwork from picture books. The Thirteenth Annual Winter Exhibition opens on 18th November and will feature work by more than fifty book illustrators including Jan Pienkowski, Babette Cole, Oliver Jeffers and Jill Murphy. The website has pages for the artists and the exhibitions, and currently has a selection of about forty limited-edition prints for sale. These would make wonderful Christmas presents; they range in price from around £50 for Benedict Blathwayt's 'Snow on the Line' up to £250-£350 or so for a framed Shirley Hughes' print. If you are looking for a more modestly priced gift, there are also signed and first-edition books available by Lauren Child and Babette Cole amongst others. It's a lovely site just to browse through.

TATE ONLINE
http://www.tate.org.uk/
The Tate does not only exist in London, of course: there is a Tate St Ives as well as a Tate Liverpool, and each gallery has its own section of the website detailing current and forthcoming exhibitions.
One particularly interesting aspect of the website for me was the section giving details of the Tate's entire collection. About forty years ago I had a friend named Christopher Le Brun who had an extraordinary artistic talent and went to study at the Slade School of Art in London. I lost touch with him when I went to live in Egypt, although my brother once posted out to me an article about him that appeared in the Sunday Times Magazine. It was easy to look him up in the alphabetical list of artists in the Tate Collection area of the website and discover that they have sixty-five of his works. I was able to view a thumbnail of most of these, although there were a few for which no image was available.

If you are unable to visit a Tate gallery in person but are interested in buying books, prints, postcards or gifts, you can purchase them on the website. There are also areas of interest for children. In addition, you can sign up for various monthly newsletters which are sent out for email: I receive one for current exhibitions as well as for events and courses.

I recently went to London one Saturday afternoon to visit both the Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain and the Mark Rothko show at Tate Modern. The website proved very useful as I was able to find out that Tate Britain closed at 5.40pm whereas Tate Modern is open until 10pm on Saturdays, so it obviously made more sense to go to the Francis Bacon show first. I was then able to see the possible ways of travelling to Tate Britain by tube or by rail. Finally, I looked at the possibility of travelling from one gallery to the other by the Tate Boat on the River Thames. The website gives the full timetable for this service as well as ticket prices.

ENGLISH RESOURCES
Andrew Moore's resource site
http://www.universalteacher.org.uk
This is a specialist site for anyone studying or perhaps teaching English, and could also be of interest to parents who are either homeschooling their children or guiding them with their English. It focuses on all areas of the GCSE and A Level English Language and Literature syllabuses but does also have sections for Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3. Anyone needing help with poetry, prose drama, grammar or even English versions of the Bible would be likely to find this an invaluable site. There is also a page giving links to a variety of useful educational sites for teachers and students of all ages, covering other subjects besides English. Although the creator of the site died several years ago, it continues to be updated on a regular basis. A site of excellent quality.

CLICK TO GIVE
http://www.thehungersite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=1
This is the first website that I visit every morning when I spend some time on the Internet before going to work. I can't afford to make as many charity donations as I would like to, but on this site just by clicking, the sponsors will donate on your behalf. I have to say that I first got to know about it through the Magic Freebies website. Click to Give is not just to help donate food to the hungry: there are also sections for breast cancer, child health, literacy, saving the rainforest and animal rescue. It only takes a few seconds to click the button on one page before proceeding to the next. The site also advertises merchandise for sale, but as it is an American site I have never purchased anything.

AMAZON
http://www.amazon.co.uk/
Amazon is in some ways the most important website on the Internet for me. Most of us are aware that prices on Amazon are very competitive; when I visit Borders in Southampton or Bristol I am always peeved that we don't have such a bookshop in Portsmouth, but I might note the title and price of one or two books and later find that they are much cheaper on Amazon. Borders then ceases to be indispensable. In my particular case, I have found French and English textbooks that have proved invaluable for my private tuition, and I might never have known of their existence had it not been for Amazon.

Amazon Marketplace has also proved to be a lucrative area. Although Amazon's fees on sales are quite high, I do find that it is possible to sell books, CDs and DVDs at higher prices than they would fetch on Ebay. If you don't sell, you don't pay any listing fees. My brother had a huge collection of CDs which he asked me to sell on his behalf (busy as he is) after downloading them onto his ipod, and I have to say that my share of the profits made this a hugely worthwhile activity.

Lesser known perhaps is Amazon Advantage, whereby for a fee of £23 a publisher can supply products to Amazon for resale. This means that they will appear on Amazon as 'in stock', and the advantage is that buyers will of course trust Amazon whereas they may not trust Marketplace sellers. In January 2006 my son and I published our own DVD for learning French, and we have been able to sell it on Amazon in this way as well as on Marketplace. Initially Amazon would only order one copy at a time, but this gradually increased to four or five. It would be the ideal way for anyone who has self-published a book to market it, provided that there is a barcode on the book of course.

DOOYOO
http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/
I am not going to go into great detail on either Dooyoo or Ciao here as this review is long enough already. I have been a member of Dooyoo for almost exactly two years but became more active a few months ago after I was invited to become co-guide for the books category. I would spend more time on the site were it not for work commitments. There has of course been a lot of controversy over the number of new members posting so many minimal reviews since Dooyoo introduced the 50p payment for a review of 150 words or more. In a way I cannot blame people who are in financial difficulty taking advantage of this system, but I wish some of them would take more pride in their work and that everyone would at least return the reads and rates that they receive. But there have of course been some new members who have treated us to consistent very high quality reviews, so it's an ill wind...

CIAO
http://www.ciao.co.uk/
I know that many people feel that Ciao is now inferior to Dooyoo, but there is something about it that keeps me there. It's nearly a month since I received any alerts and my latest product proposal is being ignored, but I carry on regardless. Silly as it may seem, the coloured dots are an incentive in the early days for most members, although when you get to bronze you can forget about dots for a while. The premium fund is something of a mystery; I've just been getting the standard £2 lately, but in the month one of my reviews was awarded a diamond I received £26. Admittedly I posted two other reviews that same month that drew large numbers of non-member reads. There is, for some, a strong sense of community on Ciao, but you have to put a bit of time in if you want to get something out of it, as with most things. I've seen quite a lot of people disappear since I joined in August 2006, but equally there are those who are still around and have been for quite a bit longer than I have. I'm still fond of the old place.

At just over two thousand words I think this is enough, but I hope you have found something interesting here. Thanks for reading.

Also to be posted on Dooyoo under my username frangliz.