"The yellow pages used to be the first source of information most people would tap to find out about a company, to see if there was an ad there, or to find telephone numbers or addresses," says John McCrae, co-owner of the Clement-McCrae Puppet Company in Kansas City, Missouri.

"Today, more and more people are turning to the Internet for that same purpose," he continues. "We wanted to have a presence for our puppet company so that people can learn a little bit about our puppet shows as a starting place."

If you thought the captivating art of puppetry and marionettes was dead (or at least not feasible into today's technological world of video games, satellite television, and computers), you are very wrong. As evidenced by the thriving business of the Clement-McCrae Puppet Company, children of all ages (adults, too) still love this skilled form of entertainment.

The Kansas City-based company, founded by Mary Litton Clement and her daughter, Mary Susan McCrae, gave their first performance in 1973 as a one-time puppet show, and it just kind of grew from there. Today, Mary Susan's husband, John, is a big part of the company, which also employs several part-time puppeteers from the area.

When the idea for a webpage came up, John says they didn't want to invest a lot of money or time initially. "There was little-to-no out of pocket cost for us to get it up and running, since we designed it ourselves. Some people were asking if we had e-mail or if we had a web page, so there was no reason for us not to jump into this.

"We had been getting offers for free 30-day trial web-site designs, and we took one place up on it, but they didn't have any vision of what we really needed. And to be quite honest, their cost was just too much and we felt it wasn't worth it for the kind of traffic we were anticipating."

The Clement-McCrae Puppet Company decided to use Geocities, a company which offers free webpages for its customers. "Our website exists primarily for informational purposes, so we wanted to keep the cost very low," McCrae states. "This site is not intended to generate a great deal of revenue for us, directly.

"At least we don't see that in the next few years. It's just not how our business is generated," he maintains, "We do not and have not planned on e-commerce, per se. We don't sell products, but services; and the service we sell is in person. So for now anyway, there is no way to leverage the Net for e-commerce.

"We elected to go with one of the free web servers, and we chose geocities.com because of its user-friendly nature. There is no monthly cost to us. The draw back is that there are pop-up ads, although, for now anyway, we felt this was not that much of a detriment for people looking for information about our company."

McCrae says that the bulk of their advertising is through direct mail, as it seems to give them the best return for their money. Their brochure, however, lists their website as a way to get more information about the company. "We have also listed our site with arts organizations in the area, within the city and region on the net and many of them have given us links," he says.

Of course, when anything is "free," there is usually a downside, which is what McCrae has found at Geocities. "What we don't like about free services like Geocities is that the webpage address is very long and people have a hard time remembering it.

"We looked into buying a domain name -- and that cost is pretty inexpensive -- $70 for two years -- but once you have the name, then the cost of having some service host your pages gets a little pricey. They wanted $60 per month to host a site. And although that isn't all that much, for a small arts company like ours, it just didn't seem worth it to us -- at least for what we have intended our site to do."

He continues, "There are all kinds of little free services doing different things on the Internet. One service called (jump.to) lets you shorten your web address a great deal and it works like a commercial domain name such as puppets.com. So instead of some long address at Geocities, you can also reach us at (jump.to/puppets) and that's a free service. People can remember that name and it doesn't cost us anything, which is great for our company."

McCrae says that their company is happy with their website because, "People often have questions when they call about our shows and our services. They might be gathering information for an upcoming civic event or company party, for example. For us, the web site turned out to be a great way for people to learn more about us. Some people don't like to call on the phone but would like the opportunity to just visit our site and read about us first -- and now they can.

"The best part about our website," he concludes, "is that people can get promotional information about our company instantly -- instant information -- and that's what it's all about!" You can visit the Clement-McCrae Puppet Company or send email to clementmccrae@geocities.com.