Websites

makeoverstudio

makeoverstudio

Nervous about that change in hairstyle? Why not look before you leap by loading your own mugshot onto this site and tinkering to your heart's content with various cuts and cosmetics. This personalised online makeover service offers a range of options include hair, nail colour and eyeliner in dozens of variations. Plus advice and case histories: "To accent Shelene's beautiful almond eyes, a base shadow of merlot was highlighted with café au lait, and then lined with suede brown for definition." Alternatively, a range of models are already online. Should you tire of Natalie, Norma, Shanda or Cyndy, fun may be had with the token blokes: Josh, for instance, looks especially fetching as a shoulder-length blonde with aubergine eye shadow, black velvet liner and fuchsia lipstick.

www.e-mum.com

This new online magazine for working mums is itself very much a family concern. Kathy Hartshorn launched the site, with help from her husband and her brother-in-law, after experiencing first-hand the problems of finding suitable work following the birth of her son.

So far, the result is a practical and down-to-earth resource with news updates, job vacancies, and a very useful find-a-minder and nursery search facility. There are also online shopping links.

Longer articles deal with childcare economics, maternity rights, that ever-elusive "work/life balance" and home-working scams.

www.freakytrigger.com

Freaky Trigger? An album, of course, by the Eighties Scottish band Win ("sorely underrated", it says here). Named in its memory, Tom Ewing's pop-centric webzine takes a personal, contentious approach, culminating, or fulminating, in the current issue with its Bad Music Special - "all your favourite bands slated". Cultural comment, useful links, and a comics section, too. Contributions welcome.

www.onlinefavourites.com

Create your own, tailored Web portal at this site. There are various ways to place bookmarks online, but this claims to be the only Java-assisted option, in the form of a personalised applet. Once registered, users can add URLs at leisure, in on or offline mode, and the resulting list is accesible via any computer. An Affinity page suggests similar links worth exploring, and there are detailed instructions for uploading Netscape and Explorer bookmark files into the new database.

www.websplit.com

Latest in a number of split-screen browser applications, this allows up to 25 favourite pages to be displayed at once. Again, bookmarks can be imported, but can then be shown "live", with a particular page selected for close-up viewing within the program. Websplit also offers "personal matching technology" to allow users to detect other surfers at the same site and chat with them online, and a real-time ratings feature showing which pages most people are visiting at any moment.

www.myname.hm

.hm could stand for homepage, but also for hype merchants, pitching the chance to acquire an .hm tag "for those who missed out on the dot.com frenzy". A short, snappy "dot home" address could be valuable, they suggest (remember business.com sold for $7m). In reality, .hm is the country code for the Heard and McDonald Islands, volcanic outcrops between Australia and Antarctica, where the penguins and petrels presumably have little use for e-mail.

websites@dircon.co.uk