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 Site Design ~ Programming  
The people you are trying to reach, whether they are staff, consumers, citizens or students, are being asked to spend their most valuable resource on your web site: their time. Waste so much as a second of this highly impatient reader and you risk losing them. Deliver them quality quickly and they will thank you by buying your products or staying at your lodge.

Web marketing is a daily grind of doing lots and lots of simple things well. It's about being useful. It's about creating a
web site that is convenient, fast and easy to navigate. Some times it is the little things that go un-noticed that can make all the difference in the world:
  • Navigation is a cornerstone to a successful web site. It needs to be intuitive and unobtrusive. It can be as simple as text links that change color when the mouse is over the link giving the view positive feedback that a click here will take him to a new page. It can be based on JavaScripts that allow for pop ups, pull outs or pull down menus. Sometimes what appears to be simple menus are the result of very complicated code. Menus, like the main menus on this site are based on Cascading Style Sheets and allow the viewer to select options without having to have the cursor over the menu text.
  • "Click on for Larger View" is a server side program that is called from the viewer computer with only 2 lines of code. When clicked on, the server program automatically resizes the picture to give the viewer the largest possible picture for his monitor's resolution. To prevent confusion by having too many windows open or hidden windows that update without the viewer knowledge, this new window will automatically close in 25 second, if the viewer clicks on the image, clicks out side the the window or clicks on the "Close Window" button.
  • At the bottom of every page we have a your copyright notice that will automatically update to the new year on January 1 of every year. The program reads the year on the viewers computer and displays it.
  • Also at the bottom of the page is the date of last update. This is not a date we plug into the HTML code but a script program that runs and reads the date the file was last uploaded to the server. You know when each page was last updated.
  • Smart forms are user input forms for info or to buy products that are self-validating. All required fields must have data before the viewer can continue. We can not test the validity of an email address, but the form will insure it is correct as to form and has all the right parts. This eliminates most of the bad addresses. We also require them to input the address twice and test to insure both are the same to eliminate errors.

Copyright © 2003- Karl Snyder, All rights reserved.