Hello, and thank you again for signing up for the D.C. Registry's newsletter . We are pleased to announce the release of the Washington Banner Network (WBN), which is a banner network that operates similarly to other banner networks such as the Internet Link Exchange. The WBN is designed to help Washington, DC area sites gain free exposure on other local sites. For each 2 times that you display banners from other sites on your page, your banner will be displayed at least once on another local site. This is a great way for local sites that want to reach a large Washington, DC audience to obtain free, targeted advertising. If you have a web site, please accept our invitation to become a charter member by going to the following URL:

http://dcregistry.com/wbn/welcome.html

Once there, simply fill out the signup form and send us a banner (details are on the page listed above). We will then send you the HTML code to put on your page so that you can begin receiving credits and having your banner displayed on other web sites.

We are also happy to report that we have made some minor improvements in the Home Page Creator. The "no quotation marks within HTML" bug has been squashed, so now you can enter HTML onto your page just as you normally would, quotation marks and all. The pages now also include a "last modified" date on the bottom, and they include our new DC Registry button. The Home Page Creator is located at "http://dcregistry.com/homes.html"

That brings us to another point, which is that if you haven't already downloaded and added one of the DC Registry buttons to your page, we encourage you to do so. We've designed three new buttons. Not only do they look nicer than the old ones, but they are also much smaller, ranging from 2k to 5k. If you add the button to your page and let us know, you get several benefits, including being added to our script that rotates prominent links to "button sites" on the Registry's front page, as well as being added to our page that lists "button sites". You will also receive preference in searches in the upcoming Search DC! search engine, so that you will come up at the top of the results when people conduct searches. More information on the button program (as well as the new buttons) is located at "http: //dcregistry.com/dcbutton.html"

We have also made a number of improvements to the free Classified Ads, such as adding a much simpler search form (the old one is still available under the "Advanced Search" link), spiffing up the other forms, fixing some minor bugs, tweaking the interface to make it more user friendly, and improving the sorting routine for numbers such as prices, etc. In the next few weeks, we will also add a "personal inbox" feature for the D.C. Personals so that people can have an inbox where viewers would post messages for them. The person who posted the ad could then access their own personal inbox with a password and view the messages. That way, people who don't want to list their e-mail address when posting a personal ad could maintain their privacy .

As always, if you enjoy the Registry, we ask that you please spread the word ! With your help, the D.C. Registry will continue to be the finest online source for information on the Washington, DC area. Thank you for using the D.C. Registry, and I hope you will continue to be a part of Washington's Online Community.

Philip A. Hagen, Webmaster
D.C. Registry
http://dcregistry.com
Washington's Online Community