I have created a Website www.paintingbykaren.net. It has only been
published for about 1 week. When I type in that address I always get
no results found. A friend in another state was able to find it thru
Yahoo, but I still cannot. Do I need to be patient and wait for the
Internet "to catch up"?

Hello Gorgeous ~ (didn't Barbra Streisand say that when she won the
Academy Award?)

There can be many reasons your site isn't listed in search engines,
but the most obvious is the fact that your site has only been
published for one week.

The first question to ask would be: Have you submitted your site to
any of the search engine submittal sites?

If you have done so, then it becomes a matter of waiting until sites
are added, and depending on the particular search engine, it can take
a very short time (a week or two) or it can take six to eight weeks.
Individual mileage may vary, but it is seldom an overnight occurrence.

Take the Internet's Number One Search Engine - Google. 

The Google Webmaster Infomartion page, at:
://www.google.com/webmasters/1.html

As explained in "2. Submitting Your Site":

"We add thousands of new sites to our index each time we crawl the
Web, but if you like, you may submit your URL as well. Submission is
not necessary and does not guarantee inclusion in our index. Given the
large number of sites submitting URLs, it's likely your pages will be
found in an automatic crawl before they make it into our index through
the URL submission form. We DO NOT add all submitted URLs to our
index, and cannot predict when or if they will appear."

The Google Add A URL page is at:
://www.google.com/addurl.html

Google also suggests adding your page to the Netscape open source
directory (DMOZ) at:
http://dmoz.org/

- other search engines, including Yahoo, incorporate listings from
DMOZ.

There is some valuable information contained in an answer submitted by
another Google Answers Researcher at:
http://answers.google.com/answers/main?cmd=threadview&id=45408

If you follow the advice and information contained in that answer,
your chances of getting included and indexed in the various search
engines increases. Please understand, though, that there are no
guarantees.

Finally, there is a plethora of information about search engines and
search engine placement on the internet. Among those recognized and
recommended as being a foremost authority is Search Engine Watch at:
http://www.searchenginewatch.com

I visited your site and your paintings are very interesting. I found
trying to read the text (especially the blue text on the first page)
against that dark grey background was extremely difficult. A white
background color #FFFFFF, as opposed to that dark gray #808080 would
enhance reading the text and would help your photos stand out better.

Hope this helps,
Serenata

Thank you so much for such a quick and involved answer. Its nice to
have someone with the knowledge to help a first timer like me. I
believe I will have a wonderful site with your answers. Thank You once
again. Please view my site again in the future to see how well I can
take advise. The best to ya, Karen

Dear Gorgeous,

Forgive me if I have the wrong end of the stick, but it's just
possible that you are not using your browser and search engine in the
right way.  You say "When I type in that address I always get no
results found".  If you type the complete address into the address box
of your browser, you will surely get promptly to the site (unless
something is wrong with the network set-up of the system you are
browsing on).

Perhaps you are typing "www.paintingbykaren.net" into a search engine?
 There is no point in doing that, of course, as anyone who knows the
address can navigate to it directly from the browser without using a
search engine.  The search engine is there for people who perhaps know
of your site but not its address, or even don't know of it but are
looking for something like it.  In this case, they might look for it
using keywords (such as "painting") or even the phrase that they
believe is the name of your site, "painting by karen".  (Note that in
this last case they would need to include the quotation marks to force
the search engine to look for the complete three-word phrase rather
than to ignore the linking word "by" and just look for any occurrences
of the words "painting" and "karen", not necessarily in that order or
even near each other.)

As Serenata says, you'll have to wait until the search engines know
about your site.  Even then, they'll also find other sites containing
or about paintings by other Karens, of course.

I trust this helps.

Carnegie

Odd, i tried clicking on the link to the website and it didn't work.
Maybe its just me but your site may be down now.