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The WorldSwitch.com®
family of Web Sites |
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The WorldSwitch.com®
family of Web Sites |
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| First Time Visitor? |
If you are a first time visitor, you may be wondering what our site is all about, and what makes us so "special."
You can see our philosophy by going to the WorldSwitch.com Home Page. At the bottom of the page, please click on "The WorldSwitch Project." You may also want to look at our "About" page.
As you "surf" through our site, you will hopefully find many
"treasures." We have nearly 2,000 pages of
information. Some pages are chock full of information, others have
less. But all pages are still being researched to find even more
information.
The Internet contains an overwhelming number of good sites, and information
overload happens pretty often. Newcomers can feel somewhat
"lost" and intimidated as they try to find sites and information.
Our mission is to make
it simpler and easier for you to get where you want to go.
We want this site to be as easy, and nearly as quick, as using the bookmarks in
your own computer. We want our site to be very simple and easy for
Internet newcomers to use, but with enough comprehensive content to satisfy even the veteran
"surfer."
You might be interested in knowing some of the design philosophy that was used
in the creation of the site:
If you are looking for "Recipes" (for example), the information is organized so you can just click a couple of times to find everything we have available. And every site on the Recipe Page has recipe information.
You can always get back to the main WorldSwitch.com page by clicking on the "Internet 1 Home" logo in the upper right hand corner of every page. Even if you are on one of our specialty web sites.
We try to give as much information as possible on each page. Instead of showing only 10 sites per page, we often display 70 - 100 sites. (You don't have to keep waiting for the next page of 10 to load.) Summary information is hidden to display more sites at one time, and to reduce "clutter." However, when your cursor passes over a site name, you may find a pop-up box with more information about the site. (This does not work on the current version of WebTV, and will not work if you have "Scripts" turned off in your browser.)
If English is not the native language of our visitor, we have a number of animated graphics throughout the sites to help people understand what is on the page. Whether you speak Chinese, Swahili, or Bantu, a picture of a steaming loaf of bread, an airplane, or a thunderstorm, should be much more effective than trying to navigate through a multi-lingual site. If the visitor is proficient in English, then the graphics may be nothing more than a little entertainment.
We are not a Search Engine, and you don't have to know any "keywords." We collected information from hundreds of search engines, directories, hot sites, ads, magazines, newspapers, books, TV shows and other sources. We have organized, combined, taken out the trash, sorted, hand verified and hand entered the information into our pages. We've already done the "up front" work, so you can simply click on where you would like to go. (Isn't that the way it should be?)
The real promise of the Internet lies with the peoples of the world. That's why we have home pages for 200 countries. (Click on "Country" in the upper left hand corner of almost every page.) A place where people of any nation can promote their sites and their National identity. (We haven't done a really good job with some of the larger, or more technologically advanced countries, but then again, everybody else already has, and we provide links to them.)
Every site we list has been hand entered. We strive to visit each and every site to verify the content, and to assure the URL is working. But sites move, merge with other sites, get sold or go out of business. With thousands of links on our site, we can't check every link as fast as they can change. If you find a bad link, please help us and click on "Fix It" at the bottom of the main page.
Our site has been rated by ICRA and Safe Surf as being suitable for visitors of all ages. We do not knowingly provide any ads, information or links to sites that promote sex, drugs, drunkenness, underage smoking or drinking, violence, abuse, software or intellectual property piracy, or any other content which (in our opinion) suggests something generally considered to be illegal, offensive or in poor taste.
WorldSwitch.com, Inc. does not put "cookies" on your computer. You do not have to have either "Cookies" or "Scripts" enabled to use our site. Click on "About" at the bottom of the main page to see our Privacy Statement.
Our pages do not have a lot of graphics or "glitz," but they load quickly and do not have any annoying pop-up ads. Even though there are National Anthems for most of the countries, and some native music, while you are on our site you have to manually activate any sounds. This is so you can visit our site at the office, or after the kids are asleep. (This may not be true if you 'click out' and leave our site.)
Our web pages have been checked with different size monitors and different screen resolutions. We have checked our pages with the two latest versions of both Netscape and Internet Explorer, as well as with WebTV. The page titles have a white background to make them easily visible, even on a poorly adjusted monitor or TV set. All our pages have a light pastel background which makes it easier on your eyes, but still gives good contrast to read the text. We have used the same font style throughout the site, and made it as large as we could, consistent with the amount of information on the page. You should not have any problems viewing our pages.
Sites that you have visited will be displayed in a different color when you look at our pages, unless you have erased the history files in your computer. (We do not look at your history files. The color change is done (at our request) by your browser, completely within your computer.)
You can't see it, but each country, and our major categories, are
actually sub webs. This gives us the ability to easily balance site activity on
different servers, or even locate servers in other countries, without the
visitor being aware of the geographic independence. It also give us an improved ability to perform change
management and disaster / business recovery.
The growth of our site has
caused us to spawn specialty sites. The "FoodSwitch.com" specialty web
site was the first to be hosted at a different location. (You may notice a different IP address.)
We also have two mirrored, identical main pages for WorldSwitch.com. Visitors initially coming to our site go to the first main page. As visitors navigate within the site and return to "Home," they use the second main page. This was done to help balance the traffic load, and further avoid slow page loading or congestion.
Finally, please see our full Privacy Statement in "About." And our legal department would like for you to click on "Legal" and "Disclaimer" to see our terms of use and other important information.
We hope you enjoy our effort, and will continue to use us as your