About the CockatooWeb Site
Updated: 2007-05-17
This is not a commercial site, we are not selling any products, nor soliciting funds. The purposes of the site are to educate the public about Cockatoos as companion animals, to share our joy with these delightful creatures and to discourage impulse purchases by those who become entranced by the beauty. We use the personal Web Services page space of our DSL connection provider to host the pages, but we are also using Google Web Albums and a personal VAX server for our Web Galleries.
Page Design
My major goals in the page design for this site is to keep the pages compatible with as many modern web browsers as possible, minimize the technical maintenance work, present the information attractively, provide easy to use and accurate navigation links, and make the site easy to update with new designs. We've selected a design that should allow you to change the width of the browser window to suite your needs and still display the text and images gracefully. However, if you make the window too narrow, some of the text/image flows may result in a strange appearance. Where possible we include alternative text for the graphics. 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. It does not work elegantly with my old Mac laptop running OS9.2.2 and IE. 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.
I still use Internet Explorer on Apple OS 9.2.2 in addition to Safari on OSX. I am aware that some features look a little strange on Apple OS 9.2.2 with IE, but even Microsoft has abandoned IE for the Mac. The site was developed with DreamWeaver 8 on MS WindowsXP.
Technical
To reach my goals I have employed 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. Doing the make-over of this site has become my 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 Apple Safari.
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