A huge welcome to all Galatea readers, particularly if you are using a computer for the first time to find dolls. Very well done indeed. If you’ve already got this far, you’ve done the hardest part. If you have found the little picture to the right of the doll looking into the shop, this is the button that will take you through to, currently, 21 pages of my dolls, all for sale, all to buy that one actual doll that you select to look at. Since I wrote the article I have added a zoom feature that allows you to play with the dolls in cyberspace. Click on a picture of a doll, when the new picture appears, click on the buttons on the bottom left hand corner to make the camera zoom in. The picture of the little house restores the original shot. You can always use the arrow in the top left hand corner of the whole computer screen to get back to the previous page.
Don’t worry, there is no way you can accidentally buy a doll in the shop, but it you wish to do so it’s easy. Clicking the button that says view details/place order will not suddenly order a doll. It will only make the zoomable picture appear. To order you have to actually click on the picture of the shopping basket to put the doll in your basket and then follow all the subsequent screens including giving your postal address and plastic money card details to order. The last thing that happens is that you see a warning appear that these are collector dolls for adults and not for children and you have to agree to that before you can proceed. So if you never see that, you haven’t bought a doll. However, if you start ‘visiting’ a doll and it vanishes, that does mean that someone else bought it. New dolls will appear, as I make more and restock the shop.
There are a whole lot of buttons to your right that say things like Meta, register and so on. There is no need to worry about these at all. If you want to make your own password and join up you can but you can read all the articles, visit the shop and play with the whole site as often as you wish, simply by being here, as you are right now. Visiting the site as often as you wish costs nothing at all. The only cost involved if you don’t have your own computer is any charges by your library, internet cafe or other access point. Most British libraries’ computers are free for the first half hour. JaneLaverick.com is more like a short newspaper than a magazine because there a new articles right here, sometimes one or more times a day; at the least, three times a week. They are: funny things, dolls, poetry and various other areas of interest that I write about. You can find all the previous articles by clicking on the buttons called Archives or Categories on the right.
If you are one of the brave readers who has gone to the library and is using a computer for the first time ever, I feel very privileged. There is nothing you can do to ‘hurt’ or ‘break’ the site so click away like a mad computery genius and see what happens. I hope you come back often, there’s always a welcome here for you. I hope you have fun, find dolls and amaze yourself with your technical expertise. This is the future, welcome to it.
For other readers I should say that Galatea is a quarterly British doll magazine founded in 1986 and still going strong under the loving care of editor Isobel Ridley, email me for details if you are interested.
