#ReleaseDate 10 JUN 99

Publication date:06-13-99

By GARY WESMAN

Staff writer

Maggie's world began with a broken-down laptop computer. It was in the spare bedroom of a house "stuck between the projects and the railroad tracks," in the words of its owner.

Four years ago, Margaret Harrison of Erie was a divorced mother of three making ends meet with temporary jobs and welfare. Today she is an independent business owner. Her domain is maggiesworld.com.

Harrison, 49, of Brooklyn Avenue, designs low-cost Web pages for companies, organizations or individuals that want to be on the Internet. Her clients include Summit Pet Hospital, the John F. Kennedy Center, Presque Isle Rotary Club, Grandview Alliance Church and many small businesses, including a book store, collection agency, interior decorator, martial arts academy and a home building and remodeling company.

"Maggie got information from everyone she could and parlayed that into a new life, a new career," said A.J. Miceli, president of ErieNet.

As a co-founder of the Erie area's largest locally owned Internet provider, Miceli talks about Harrison with the affection of a mentor whose protege has exceeded either of their dreams.

"She has overcome the odds," Miceli said.

Maggiesworld.com, which started as a hobby, turned into a full-time business 15 months ago.

"I was ecstatic that someone would pay me to do something I loved doing more than you could imagine," Harrison said.

Miceli guesses there are between 30 and 50 Web page designers in the Erie area, counting independent businessmen and women, hobbyists and employees of computer service companies.

"The number of those who are making a recognizable income from it is probably between 10 and 25," Miceli said.

Harrison's business is still a one-woman operation. She still runs it from her home in what used to be grandpa's bedroom. She starts work after her children (Lei Ann, 15, Albert, 9, and Mary, 5) go to school; she stops in mid-afternoon and resumes once the kids are in bed. But when she makes sales calls, she can tell prospective customers she has designed more than 300 Web pages, 156 of them still active as of last week.

"She can take a blank computer screen and make a Web page out of nothing," said Kristina Straub of Erie, a member of Grandview Alliance Church.

Three years ago, Harrison and Straub met while working for the same temporary agency. They discovered they both liked computers and became friends by chatting via e-mail after work. Today Straub and her husband Bill, as the team of K&B, maintain the Web page that Harrison designed for their church.

"Maggie's self-taught. From scratch," Straub said.

Wearing turqouise earrings and a turquoise jacket over a "Maggie's World" T-shirt to a recent interview, Harrison looked the part of a smart but casual cyberspace entrepreneur.

"When I got hooked on the Internet, I knew absolutely nothing," she said. "I think I've found my niche."

Subhead: Been there, done that

In the spring of 1970, anti-Vietnam war demonstrations disrupted almost all American colleges. Twenty-year-old Maggie Harrison read letters sent home to her from Vietnam by her friend and next-door neighbor.

"I wanted to go fight for my country and end the war," she said.

Harrison enlisted in the Navy. She served aboard the hospital ship U.S.S. Sanctuary, which holds a unique place in the history of Navy women. In November 1972, the Sanctuary became the first U.S. Navy ship with a mixed crew of men and women, according to the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships.

Women had long served as nurses and Navy WAVES. Never before had they been given sea duty as regular crew members until two women officers and 60 enlisted women were assigned to the Sanctuary.

"I was a bosun's mate," Harrison said. "I hung over the side with the guys and chipped paint."

She has good memories of the travel and mostly good memories of shipboard life while serving from 1970-74.

"I would have made a career of it except I really believe it was a man's Navy," she said. "Women had to do twice the work to get half the credit."

Harrison said she divorced her husband and divorced the Navy about the same time. She describes the next two decades of her life as "a long line of going everywhere and doing everything."

She studied business management in Charlestown, S.C. As one of the older and more wordly undergrads, she wrote the advice column for the college newspaper under the byline, "Dear Gertrude."

Harrison said she joined the Salvation Army church for a time and supervised more than half a dozen Salvation Army thrift stores.

She said she was living in Arizona when her mother, Ann Fuller, persuaded her to come home to Erie. In March 1991, Harrison bought her house on Brooklyn Avenue for $19,900 and moved in next to her mother.

"A house stuck between the projects and the railroad tracks," is how Harrison describes it. "There's only three of us on the block my mother, our neighbor and myself."

As she discovered the Internet in her spare time, Harrison worked as a temp. For a while she was on welfare, collecting $249 every two weeks, she said.

"You know the expression, "been there, done that"? Well, I've been there, done that, bought the T-shirt and sold it at a yard sale," Harrison said.

Subhead: Gotta know how that works

Four and a half years ago, Harrison had a laptop computer. She typed letters on it.

"It went crazy on me," Harrison recalls, so she took the laptop to a Wesleyville computer shop, whose owner persuaded her to junk it and try a used Packard Bell. In time, she bought a Canon 386, her first machine with Windows.

Until then, Harrison saw only black-on-white text on her computer screen; now it was in color with pictures and graphics, plain or fancy lettering and logos that twirled.

"I've gotta know how that works," Harrison would say to herself.

ErieNet went online the day after Christmas 1994 with zero subscribers. Harrison thinks she was the company's 16th sign-up. Miceli doesn't remember the exact number but says Harrison was among the first 50 for sure.

"Maggie was unusual in that most people in her situation didn't have computers," he said.

Miceli said those first Internet devotees, dabblers and experimenters were either college students or BBSers; that is, users of electronic bulletin board services who would "dial up, swap files, play games and send intrasystem e-mail" to each other.

"Maggie was among the people who knew how to get information via BBS," Miceli said.

Harrison took ErieNet's beginner course in HTML, the formatting language of the World Wide Web. To a novice, HTML looks like a gibberish of brackets and equal signs and symbols, as if someone ran a finger over the top row of typewriter keys. Actually, they are instructions that will place a photograph here, place words over there, center something on the screen or move it to the far left or right, or set it all against a decorative background.

Miceli said his company had only two "technical support guys" in the beginning. Harrison calls one of them, Sal Buttice, "the mellow guru of ErieNet."

"He and Maggie bonded," Miceli said.

A door opens and the voice of an unseen person beckons.

Snow falls gently around a church as a hymn plays in the background.

Those and other Web page effects kept popping up on Harrison's screen, piquing her curiosity. For Harrison, the freshness of those small marvels hasn't worn off. Remembering how she reacted to each new thing she saw, she widens her eyes, places her hand on her chest, sharply draws a breath and says, "I've gotta know how that works."

Harrison started designing Web pages for relatives and friends. At first they were simple, single pages. Many were in-memory-of pages displaying a photo of a deceased loved one and some words of remembrance.

One day, Harrison said, she heard from the owners of a fishing camp and summer cottages in Florida. They had seen a Web page she designed for her uncle in Florida. Would she make one for their business?

Harrison said the Floridians sent her an unexpected $50 check. It was nice of them and good for her ego. And she had a thought:

"They'd pay me? And I get to stay home and do this?"

Harrison said she learned by looking and asking: Find a Web page she liked, look up the source code available to anyone, then phone or e-mail the designer and ask how he or she did it.

Again and again, Harrison said she was astonished at how willingly people would share know-how with a stranger and a comparative novice like herself.

"And I talk a lot," she said.

If the Internet has a creed, it's "Information wants to be free," Miceli said.

"The Internet grew up ... with all the code hanging out there and readily available," he said. "Smart people could innovate."

Harrison said she would sometimes fiddle for hours or days to get a favorite new effect to work right.

A red rose blooms atop the home page of Trish's Virtuous Domain, a maker of floral arrangements. TLC, a pet grooming business in Lawrence Park, has cartoon dogs. A terrier chases a ball across the screen. A puppy opens a mailbox for e-mail. A poodle taking a bubble bath congratulates the customer who won a year of free pet-grooming.

"To somebody who doesn't know this stuff, it seems complicated," Harrison said. "When you do it, you realize it's so easy.

""Five years ago," she said, "I would have told you I don't know enough; I'm too stupid. But trust me, anybody can learn if you've got the curiosity."

Subhead: Wild Wild Web

Anyone who looks for "Maggie's world" through a search engine is apt to blush, retch, giggle or wince in surprise at what turns up.

Maggie Harrison's business is maggiesworld.com. On her home page is a disclaimer warning visitors not to confuse her site with others of the same name. That is because another "maggiesworld" Web site, but with the suffix "dot-net," appeared in November. That one is a copyrighted personal page by an anonymous author, devoted to "spanking erotica."

In retrospect, Harrison wishes she had registered "maggiesworld" under all three of the most common suffixes, dot-com, dot-net and dot-org, to avoid mistaken identities.

"I am not a prude. She can put whatever she wants up there," Harrison said of the spanking enthusiast. "But people should know it's not me."

This is what Miceli tells parents about the Internet and why they should monitor where their children go:

"The virtual world has a dark side and it has a red-light district, just like the real world," he said.

One of its diversions is the MUD (for "multi-user dungeon") games. Players invent characters who battle each other, slay villains, rescue damsels, skirt danger and accumulate points in the form of sacks of gold, deeds to castles and the like.

Harrison is an enthusiastic player. When the workday is done, when the kids are asleep, when the e-mail has been answered, Harrison strides into combat at 2 a.m. as her alter ego, a centaur-like female warrior.

"It's fun," she said. "You take out aggression, too. Get in there and slash the zombie."

Since the Columbine High School murders, the state Senate has been taking a second look at a bill to devise a ratings system, like movie ratings, for violent video games. One bill being debated would make it a crime to sell or rent an adults-only game to anyone under 18.

"They have a point," Harrison said of the legislators.

The debate in Harrisburg so far has been over video games, the kind sold and rented in cartridges, rather than the role-playing games on the Internet. Harrison said many MUD games have age limits and other safeguards, though they aren't foolproof.

"I let (daughter) Lei Ann get on as a character once," Harrison said. "Luckily, she was not interested. But I can see how a 15-year-old could get engrossed in them."

subhead: E-commerce

"I'm cheap," Harrison said, giving one immediate reason why a customer might be interested in hiring maggiesworld.com.

Her advertised prices are $10 to create a banner, logo or graphics, $60 to register a Web page, $50 to teach HTML code and $150 to set up a Web site.

Miceli said some Web page designers in the Erie area charge more than 10 times as much as Harrison. Others, adapting standard formats to individual customers, charge between $300 and $800 for a Web site with four or five linked pages.

Harrison said many of her early customers were people she already knew, and she soon realized she needed a way to reach beyond her circle of friends, relatives and acquaintances.

In early 1997, the first edition of the Erie Metropolitan Black Yellow Pages came out in print. The annual 50-page publication is a directory of businesses owned by African Americans in Erie, Meadville and Jamestown, N.Y.

Harrison said she paid a call on Cynthia Muhammad, the publisher of the Erie Metropolitan Black Yellow Pages, at Muhammad's book store on Parade Street. The two women talked about putting the directory on the Internet and soon after the first electronic edition appeared at pierieblackpages.com

The Internet edition contains e-mail or Web page connections to 25 companies, organizations and individuals, including about a dozen private businesses.

Harrison said the owners of small businesses can be tough to sell on going online, especially those of her generation who grew up before school and office computers were commonplace.

"This is a new avenue for them. They are not sure if they'd benefit," Harrison said. "They're kind of leery. They say, "Well, I don't have a computer at home.""

As of June 3, the Web site of Grandview Alliance Church, 1102 E. Gore Road, had attracted 904 visitors in the previous 20 months. People from across the country had signed the electronic guestbook, pictured with a quill pen moving across an open book.

"I just kind of stumbled onto it," one of the visitors, Robert D. Parker, a retired minister living in Niland, Calif., south of Palm Springs, said in a telephone interview.

Parker and his wife, Amanda, lived in Erie in the 1970s while Bob Parker was the executive director of the Boys & Girls Club and directed a number of church choirs.

"I'm retired, so I have the time to just go across the country on my computer, looking for sites to enjoy," he said.

Browsing for Christian Web sites and Erie Web sites one evening, he found Grandview Alliance Church. Like most of those who signed the guestbook, Parker was complimentary.

"It's one of the better ones," he said. "It brought Erie very much back to mind."

Businesses know that Internet visitors are not necessarily buyers. The Straubs have learned that visitors to their church's Web page, however complimentary, are not necessarily tomorrow's new members.

Kristina Straub said most of Web site's visitors so far are either out-of-town browsers or church members with home computers checking the weekly update of church events.

Straub said one couple, about to move to Erie and looking for a church to join, found Grandview Alliance on the Web and became members.

"To be honest, there have been less than I thought," she said.

Subhead: Maggie's future world

Harrison wants maggiesworld.com to thrive and grow but does not yet have definite plans to expand beyond a solo enterprise. Someday, maybe, a circle of women she is now teaching will join the business.

"They are single mothers, they are black and they are local. And they are friends," Harrison said. "If we can make it work, that will really be nice."

Harrison said one of her ambitions is to learn more about coding and how to create computer programs.

"I want it to stay fun," she said. "I don't ever want it to become a chore.

""If you asked me three years ago, I would not have said this. But it would be nice if I typed in "maggiesworld" and it's on the Top Ten Web sites."

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