How this site was made
My motives to publish this site are simple.  There are fun things that don't require much money  and too often that gets lost in the woods of consumerism.  The web has helped me so I want to reciprocate.

This site was made in FrontPage 2000  but many free or shareware programs would do the job.  Some great sites are created in Window's accessory program Notepad, but this requires skill in HTML.  Graphics are done in Corel 8 but like most projects, the tools are less important than ideas.  The advertising on this site allows it to be posted for free.  Seems fair to me.

Websites offer a huge amount of assistance to web designers  There are lots of free programs downloadable from sites like cnet.com and most free hosting sites have on-line programs.  After struggling with the extremely slow on-line method, I'd recommend using your own software for more than a few pages.

Web design software at first resembles a disobedient word processor.  Text and graphics aren't easily positioned by dragging and dropping, and the properties of objects must be adjusted in dialog boxes.  One way to regain control is to use tables and cells to form a grid to organize the page. The cells can be changed as you work, and each one can be modified separately from its neighbors.

Viewing the underlying HTML code is useful for beginners to understand how HTML is stored.  It's easy to see how the underlying code changes as the page is edited in page view. If you edit the code the page view changes, and vice versa.

Since I want to connect with readers with similar interests of all nationalities whether they have high-speed or 24K dial-up, I try to keep photos, animations and other bloat to a minimum.   Why narrow your audience to high-speed users, unless your site is of interest only to them?  It's fun to get responses from Africa, South America or other places that may not have a T1 connection.  Writing clear simple sentences and avoiding jargon can make translations with Babelfish-type services more effective. 

My current computer is a bargain-priced PC running Windows XP.
Photos are mostly taken with a Kodak digital, while others came from a camera I got free from an ISP.  A simple mega-pixel camera is all that is needed for pictures because after the photos are re-sampled to 600 pixels wide at 72 dpi, more resolution is lost. Cropping out uninteresting backgrounds before resampling can speed up the loading of your site.  Using GIF files for simple graphics uses less file space than JPG, which is suited for photos.

Pictures are worth a thousand words, but they also can raise questions.   A photo with no text can to leave readers baffled about what they are seeing, not unlike local TV news that relies on footage and not facts.  While I have no writing experience I enjoy sharing ideas in a medium that has given me so much, so I muddle along as best I can.

Stan

 

 

 

 


Portland Head Light, Portland Maine.