About the Site

Updated: 2007-05-17

This is a personal web site and not intended for commerce. We maintain two other sites, one about Cockatoos and the other about the Poolesville, MD area.

Page Design

The old page layout was based on the "Trellix" tool provided by Bell Atlantic/Verizon for customer web sites. That code was repeatedly "butchered" at my hands using a succession of bad HTML editors. Eventually it was time to clean house and rebuild the site.

My goals in the page design for this and the other sites which I publish is to minimize the technical maintenance work, present the information attractively, provide easy to use and accurate navigation links, emphasize cross browser compatibility and facilitate future changes in the visual format. The design relies upon modern web browser features such as CSS and Javascript. There is just no way to get the pages to work with every old browser version. Many old browser versions have horrible bugs and the effort required to work around the problems would prevent me from my primary task of content creation.

If your browser is Netscape 4.x or Internet Explorer 4.X, or even a recent IE on Mac OS9.x these pages may not display properly. Please accept my apologies if this design is not compatible with your web browser, but my resources are limited for testing. I know how some of you may be using an old version, I still use Internet Explorer on Apple OS 9.2.2 in addition to Safari on OSX.

Technical

To reach my goals I have used a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) based design with absolute positioning for controlling layout and appearance. The CSS is an external file which controls the appearance of the content and positioning on the web page. I've created several page templates in the Dreamweaver tool utilizing library items to make it easy to make updates (and corrections!)

The page design used on this site is a liquid layout design based on coding and templates from the "Santorini Jumpstarts" project at CommunityMX. They have validated the original HTML and CSS components with a wide variety of browsers and include the ever-important accessibility features. The liquid layout allows the width of the body text and menus to shrink and expand to the width of the browser window. If you resize your browser window you will see that the right margin panel slides over the main text, while the right banner image in the masthead slides under the left banner image. I used the layout as a learning exercise to become more familiar with both Dreamweaver 8 and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) approaches to web layout.

In my professional work as a web master I had been previously limited to using FrontPage 98. That is a fatally flawed product. A few years ago all technical tasks such as HTML coding were outsourced to contractors. This allowed me to concentrate on Government functions instead of web HTML coding, but I was stuck with my FP98 skills. The contractors get to do the "fun stuff" and use the new tools. The make-over of this site was a learning exercise. In the Santorini design I made some minor modifications for some of the menus and page content, especially floating images and captions. Some modifications still remain to be completed, such as the "shell" logo that appears for mouseovers in the left margin menus. That should become a "parrot" logo in the near future. The CSS for printing needs more work and you can see that the "Quick Links" box in the left margin is not active yet. But I'll get that fixed in the future.

Since the original Santorini design was validated XML and CSS, with great cross browser compliance, I have tried to keep my modifications relatively minor. I cannot say that all of my code validates properly, as I have had to make some compromises with the Dreamweaver templates. I review my pages with WindowsXP IE V6, FireFox and on Apple OSX with Safari.