About Four Sister’s Web Site
Questions?
- Questions about this site?
- Broken links?
- Something doesn't work as expected?
- or... If your housing co-op is interested in developing a web site, and doesn’t quite know where to start, give me a holler. If I can’t be helpful, at least I can commiserate.
Purpose:
The main purpose of this site is to attract prospective co-op members. It’s the old story, we need members to fill the suites and to help run the place, or the whole thing falls apart, and we don’t want that. If you’re involved in running a housing co-op, you’ll know this all too well. The second purpose is to have a web site that’s useful as an example to other co-ops that may want to develop their own web site.
How this site came to be:
Like most things, it was developed out of need, and produced with sweat equity on a miniscule budget (a donation to Vancouver Community Network, who hosts our web site) and that’s pretty much the story—no professionals were used or harmed during the production of of this site.
A bit more if you’re not easily bored:
When I started, I knew absolutely nothing about HTML, graphics, or web authoring, and figured using FrontPage 98 (web designers, insert hearty laugh here) was the way to go—at the time it was, since having a web site, any web site, was better than none. My next foray into content creation software was Dreamweaver MX which was a quantum leap ahead of FrontPage 98. While WYSIWYG content creation software can be helpful, it takes almost as much time and frustration to learn all the features as it does to learn HTML. Another problem was that glitches kept cropping up that I couldn’t fix without delving into the mark-up. I still use Dreamweaver, but just for file management and as a nifty HTML text editor.
With the second iteration of this site, I spruced up the visuals, adhered to actual HTML standards (mostly)—HTML 4.01 Transitional if your interested—and started using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for formatting. Layout was taken care of with HTML tables, and navigation rollovers courtesy of JavaScript.
This is the third iteration of the Four Sisters web site, and the temptation to jump into the somewhat murky waters of the future (present?) was irresistible. Murky waters? Yes. A lot of very smart, wonderful people develop excellent standards which, in theory, should make the web designer’s life easy. In a just world, a web site would have an identical look and functionality no matter what web browser it is viewed in: Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Opera, Firefox, Safari, or any other browser. But alas, ‘tis not so. Browser frustrations aside, the site now adheres to XHTML 1.0 Strict should you be interested. Go ahead, validate this page.
The main advantages of using CSS for layout and formatting are: paying homage to the web designer’s mantra—separate style from content; adding versatility to page layout far beyond anything imaginable in plain HTML; making web maintenance ever so much easier. For fantastical CSS examples, check out CSS Zen Garden. The unfortunate side effect of all this, is that CSS standards, as wonderful as they are, are not consistently implemented, nor interpreted by the various browsers, and so we have WYSINNWTDI: What You See Is Not Necessarily What The Designer Intended.
That risk noted, I boldly tossed my HTML tables onto the digital scrap heap and committed myself to CSS for layout and formatting. I now apologize to all those who will experience this site with various “whoopses” and foibles. To partially mitigate these frustrations, I’ve added a little PHP—a recursive acronym for “PHP: Hypertext PreProcessor” what ever that means—voodoo that switches appropriate styles depending on whether you’re using IE 7, IE6, or Firefox. If it works as planned, that’s means about 91.3% of you (19.7%, 37.3%, and 34.0% respectively, according to W3Schools) are viewing this site as intended.
What, still here?
Last, but not least, the navigation scheme: I’ve dispensed with JavaScript, which totally mystifies me, anyway, and concocted it entirely of PHP and CSS.
Need Help?
If your housing co-op is interested in developing a web site, and doesn’t quite know where to start, give me a holler. If I can’t be helpful, at least I can commiserate.