Bibliography

At Ventura County Computers, where I am a partner, the primary design criteria was that the site had to be able to keep order out of more than 100 pages (not all are up and running yet). For this reason, the menuing system is more complicated than my other sites, with sub-menus only visible when you click on the main page. On some pages, the boxes on the right become sub-menus while on others they advertise merchandise for sale or provide definition of terms. This required a three-column layout. And I wanted to use rounded corners on all shapes (nearly impossible using old-fashioned layout techniques). We wanted to keep some design elements from the previous page, so the picture of Roxy (the dog) and the VCC banner are retained as was the color-scheme.

The Lions Club District that encompasses Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties (4-A3) wanted a site to communicate with the 38 member clubs covering a large, diffuse area. Naturally, they wanted all the forms the clubs submit to be included, but they also wanted the district roster to be available to district officers and contact information to be available to the public. If you click on "District Roster" you will see live data -- the entire district database is online, with the public invited to view only the contact information. District officers, naturally, can view all the data when traveling. More importantly, they are looking at the same data. It used to be that officers wouldn't always update their database when a new one was distributed. Incidentally, the "Find a Club" search is of live data also.

The Oxnard Noontimers Lions Club (Rick and Toby are members) is a member of the Lions District 4-A3. Their board is able to view live data, but only of Noontimer members. The rest of the data is not available. Both the District and Noontimer pages have their calendar of events on the home page because this is the main item members check into the site for.

Incidentally, no Javascript is used on the site -- even for the popup menu descriptions (hover the mouse over one of the menu items to see the effect).

The Channel Islands PC Users Group needed a site that could be easily maintained by a number of people. Their webmistress does most of the updating but some committee chairmen update their own pages. They wanted a uniform look and feel despite the number of contributors.

Incidentally, the background image of Anacapa in the Channel Islands has long been the club's logo, but in previous designs was always a space-consuming graphic on each page. By including it as a background image in CSS, we achieved the dual purpose of preserving content space and getting it outside the reach of accidental deletion by committee editors.

This is Toby's family page. Because each link goes to another site (or at least another completely different design), we were able to use darker colors than one would on a larger site and experiment with some interesting effects. There are no visible graphics on the page until you hover the mouse over one of the menu items. Nope. Not a single GIF image. Nor is any Javascript used. The popup pictures are created entirely in CSS and HTML.

Unless you are well-versed in web page design, none of this will be of any great interest to you, except that all this hocus-pocus means that the pages will display properly in anything, even a PDA, and will load rapidly for users on slow connections.

PurFlo designs, builds and distributes pond and pool filters. They continue to develop new filters and need the web site kept up to date. Since they don't have the staff to maintain the site, they needed one that could be changed easily and inexpensively. VCC does all the editing, which includes frequent changes to the page structure (and hence menu) as well as simple picture and text changes.

The web design and changes cost very little and enable them to keep in touch with their dealers far more inexpensively and quickly than they could have any other way.

The Arroyo Grande Lions wanted a simple site they could maintain themsleves. We provided the graphics and design and they maintain it themselves quite easily.

It's a simple site for which we provided simple instructions as to where and how to make modifications. They have been using it for several years and it has not been modified to be W3C compliant, though it could be quite easily. It relies heavily on CSS.

Web pages don't have to be complicated to be useful. Unless you are a large company (or someone with a huge website), you don't need to clutter up your pages with lots of pieces of information. The only reason to have a hugely cluttered site like CNN News is to flatten out the menuing. If you put everything is simple, direct menus, it would take you 15 clicks to drill down to the story you wanted. So they have to have a cluttered, site with more than 100 links on the home page. Small businesses don't have 100 pages, much less a need to make them all available on one page. Keep it simple and your viewers will find things far easier and be happier.