Dear Pete, One of the big problems people face getting on the Net is that they have no picture of what it means. This makes the relationship to their Internet Service Provider complicated, and especially if you are trying to cope with Windows and Explorer as well, you might give up. The fact that these are often bundled together does not make things simpler, because it confuses quite separate tasks. People constantly confuse their computer operating system with the stuff for getting on the Web. I have had friends who thought that you did something to your computer alone and somehow you got on the Net. You need to use a workable analogy: I tend to use the idea of two books talking over the telephone. How would they communicate without sound? Most people also have no idea how the phone works, so you have to say, well, just as the phone translates your voice into electronic patterns and sends them down a wire, and then untranslates them and puts them back into sound patterns, so the Internet takes the stuff in one book (what you are typing), puts it into little packages and sends them off to be retranslated at the end of the line somewhere else. Sometimes you can pre-design the pages you are going to send off, which is what HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is for. For all of this to work, you need your own phone number (your computer address), you need to hook up to some phone company equivalent, and so on....

My experience as a learner and as an explainer of the Web has been that people need a rough mental map of what is going on, even if they quickly forget it, and even if it is somewhat simplified. It is also important to explain all acronyms so that they aren't terrified by them.

Yours, Peter T.