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www.Fringe99

Dateline: 27th June, 1999

There are 643 shows at this year's Fringe in the Dance/Physical Theatre, Music Theatre and Theatre categories. There are, currently, around 75 - 80 Websites covering them. Many of them are not strictly fringe-related, but are sites of companies which are playing at the Fringe and quite a lot make no mention of their involvment. Or, at least, they don't at the moment: that may, of course, change. A large number of these "sites" (as I have called them) are not really sites at all, but pages on the site of a venue.

What that means is that only 12% (or thereabouts) of shows have associated sites. But let's continue the statistical analysis a bit further: there are, according to my rough count, 57 shows from the USA, which is 8.86% of the total, and 8% of the websites are for American companies. In other words, the Brits seem to have caught up with the Yanks in terms of Fringe websites. Now that's something of a first!

Of the 198 venues in the Fringe, there are websites for seven of them: that's 3.5%. Of the "big three", only the Gilded Balloon has a site. The other venues which have sites are:

Update 2001 - Some of these URLs have now changed.

Of course the main site to which people interested in the Fringe will head is the official one at www.edfringe.com. It's a massive site, with details of every show and every venue. You can search its database in numerous ways:

  • By date : On the navigation bar down the left hand side you'll see a calendar for the month of August. You simply click on the day you're interested in and up will come a list of everything happening on that day in chronological order.
  • By venue, artist or show : Click on the drop-down list on the left and you'll be given the choice of these three options. Choose the one you want, and then click on a letter (or number - some companies use numbers in their names), and you'll be taken to a full list of all you've asked for. It's simple then to find exactly what you're looking for, and a further click will take you to the relevant page.
  • By word : Clicking on this option (beneath the drop-down list) will replace the frame with the sort of search boxes we're used to seeing on many sites.
  • By Artform : Clicking on this replaces the navigation frame with another which has icons for all the artforms. Clck, for instance, on the Theatre icon and the main frame will fill with the title of eevry theatre show, arranged alphabetically.

Each page is linked to others. For instance, in a theatre artform search you can look up a show and then click on a link to the venue's page.

As you can see, it's a major site-building exercise to get something like this online so, human beings being what they are, it would not be surprising if there are some mistakes. I have worked my way through the entire theatre, dance and physical theatre, and musical and opera sections and have to admit that I found none. That, I think, is a significant achievement!

However there is one aspect of the site in which there are many mistakes, and that is the provision of links to individual companies' or venues' own sites. These links appear on the company or venue pages and there are mistakes by the score! Some may well be due to the companies themselves - there are a number which have given the addresss of a site which does not exist (as yet?) - but some have to be down to whoever entered the details into the database. For example, the number of sites which are given addresses which begin with http://http://... is amazing!

Obviously some companies have given their addresses as www.thiscompany.co.uk/, whilst others have given theirs as http://www.thatcompany.co.uk/, and the person who has entered them has simply added http:// regardless.

But that is really a comparative minor quibble because help is at hand. To find Fringe sites which actually exists, with the correct URL, all you have to do is go to our Fringe Library (2001 Update - No longer exists: only online around Fringe time) and you'll find all the links that actually exist - and they all work!

It is, however, depressing that so few of the companies appearing at the Fringe have Websites - almost 80% don't. Since the advent of free ISPs, huge numbers of people in the UK have gone online. Freeserve, which has been in existence for less than six months, is now bigger, so I read, than AOL and Compuserve, and leaves the likes of Demon, Force9 and Pipex miles behind. And that is just one of the ever-increasing number of free ISPs.

It is slightly shocking (to me, at any rate) that so many companies are missing out on the cheapest publicity it's possible to get. You don't even have to buy an extra program to create your site: many ISPs provide basic HTML programs and anyone who uses IE or Navigator gets one free.

But the most depressing thing, to one who thinks the Net is the best thing since sliced bread, is the fact that two of the major venues - the Assembly Rooms and the Pleasance - have not bothered. If you are a regular reader of our News column, you'll know that, back in March, we carried a story about the financial problems faced by the Assembly Rooms, which was followed up in April by the news that a compromise had been reached. You would have thought that even the most basic of sites would have given them an additional way of attracting punters.

Perhaps it's the usual British suspicion of anything new!

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©Peter Lathan 2001