PC Users' Group of the Redwoods

  Website Insights

This page is talk about all the decisions that go into making up a page for the PCUGR website and how that reflects technically and on the club.  This is from the Web Master and may grow to be more formal. These are not Frequently Asked Questions.  In fact I rarely get questions

Objectives:

These are some of the goals and objectives that are addressed with each page.

Keep in mind most members use a 28.8 modem to have the pages delivered to their browsers.    This was easy to forget and I had to be reminded.  I have the Wireless DSL connection from Broaderlink through Sonic.  It's made all the difference in the world but it's easy to take that connection for granted and create "heavy pages."

Involve as many of the club members as possible in the website. The PCUGR website has always be cool, but I wanted to expand the content to include anyone that does anything within the club to help out, to make life easier, or sharing in anyway.  To put more  focus on the people that make up the club.  There are new pages for On-line Reviews, Member's Websites, New Members, All the new SIG will get a page.  Let's expand the site until we reach our quota for web pages on Sonic.  That will be a good problem.

The PCUGR site is best viewed with Internet Explorer.     This is not because I don't like Netscape.  In fact when coding Java Script Netscape has a debugging facility that is free with their browser that is really helpful.  MS want's you to buy Visual InterDev (not cheap).  Windows XP won't even support JScript; we'll all have to get plug-ins.  Billy wins because I like Front Page (more on that later).  The site was converted to FP when Ben Ezzel took it over.  The transfer to my system was painless.  Steve Cerrutti hand-coded the site up until Ben "automated it."  When I got it some of the hand coded Java Script was broken.  If you view source on the home page I think there's still some bits left in there.  Actually FP is pretty good with this.  I don't know why it was broken. Anyway, Sonic Net, which hosts our site is Linux based and doesn't support the FP extensions. So, it's not IE that wins by being best.  It wins by default.

The PCUGR website probably does not work with all browsers.  This is only because I haven't check it on all browsers.  I am not coding for any browser older thatn IE or NS 3.0.  I would bet 98% of our club is at 4.0 or better anyway.  IE 5.5 is just about gone.  I wonder if IE 6.0 will be for XP only?

 FrontPage 2000 Generates HTML that isn't as efficient as what can be coded by hand but we will forgive it. Hand coding is the best, but it requires an amazing amount of HTML, CSS and image knowledge from the programmer.  Even when I was fast at coding by hand, I couldn't keep up with someone who really knew Dream Weaver, FP allows something to be done as easily as a word processor. 

Well, if you have any questions that I didn't cover here.  You know where to find me.  Let me know,

Jim Bowers
PCUGR Web Master

So I really like FP 2000 because:
It handles directories really well, including renaming web objects.  FP finds them all and get them all changed.  Tough, by hand.