Yes my name I Eric aka Santa according to resent children's visit with a white beard. Iliff aka Gandalf has long ginger beard and hair in ponytail.
I am an electrical engineer and Iliff was an architect mainly for hospitals in Africa before 30 years ago he took over his grand dads woodland.
My involvement was photographic which was my hobby Iliff wanted pictures of the woodland for his website.
However the web page masters he was using were very restrictive to what he could show seems they were using svBuilder to display pictures which had a line of icon pictures below and a single picture expanded which only used around 1/3 of the page leaving most the page empty. The text only showed with mouse over. I voiced the idea that the writing should always be viewable and for most it needed a pair of pictures.
It would seem they were also using a very restrictive system from what they said called Joomla which created 100's of files and just to produce two pages took two people all day. This
http://settingtheforestfree.org/ was the result of 16 hours work. Clearly Joomla was a very slow system.
It also seemed according to his web masters that pictures within text all have to be down the left hand side due to using frames. However looked more like tables to me. They told me they don't use pictures as text as web crawlers can't find it, they also don't use CSS or Javascript yet the pages seem full of both. Also they don't use flash but the word cloud on the index page at
http://www.naturalforestpractice.com/ will not work on an Iphone because it's run with flash.
In spite of producing a demo page with two pictures and text they tell me it can't be done. Since these guys are professional not a simple electrician like me I have taken their word for it and my attempts to use Joomla were a complete failure and with inquiry I was told whole idea of Joomla was to give varying access to different members of a group.
I also heard them blame front page and dream weaver for not being able to do some functions I have had problems with nvu, and using the design mode in front page has on times failed but in code mode both front page and dream weaver seem to work fine the latter giving colour changes on the code which alerts one of mistakes. Which is an advantage to using notepad. I don't use any of them to upload pages I prefer to see them all run first then use WS_FTP95 to upload the pages.
I never intended to write the web page myself. My idea was to offer ideas in action to how the pages could evolve. What I now realise is a problem is Iliff is trying to do far too much himself the web masters wanted a complete text ready to cut and paste into the site and a folder full of pictures. Also Iliff had to be there while every "T" was crossed and every "I" dotted he could not as he does with me say "I have a visit on Tuesday can you cover it" and by Tuesday evening there is an array of pictures published on the net.
He wants be to link to the other site but there is not a single page anchor and many pages with just a little in each on the subject, so where he talked about for example ash when I link to the page the user has to scroll through two pages of text to find what he says about ash. I have therefore built an "About" page as an interface. He does not like my About page but until he includes some anchors and ratifies his existing pages I can't see how I can link to multi small references.
However one thing I am sure can be improved on is the pull down menu. As it stands I cut and paste the modified pull down menu into each page one at a time. I am sure there is a way to have a common pull down menu for all pages?
My aim is for the user not to have to scroll to view pages. There will be a little as all screens are not the same but idea is to produce a presentation where the user can just site back and watch the pages. To get the odd portrait picture in I have been suppressing the heading. However this means buttons jump up and down. I have tried using right picture and forward and left as reverse it works but not sure about it as yet.
It has all been a steep learning curve. My sister was a computer analyst and I have always relied on her for help. But her death earlier this year has resulted in no one it the family to ask now. Did an access course to IT back in 2004 but seems every thing has moved on since then.
Thank you for all your help.
