60-270 Advanced Web Design

A Windsor Webmaster's Wonderings

Menu Home Style Sheets Configure the Site Accessibility Guidelines Wishful Thinking Report

A logical and most useful topic for the second assignment is the extension of Advanced Website Design beyond that covered in class. Style sheets, JavaScript, and access would be the main subtopics. A noticeable facet of the Internet in recent years is the explosion of blogs. Going with the flow, this website will have a personal flavour. The attraction of the phrase 'A Windsor Webmaster Wonders' is that it is alliterative, in the same way that World Wide Web is also alliterative. The three Ws can be arranged in numerous ways to make a sutible favicon. One of the definitions of wonder is to have a wish or desire to know something. Thinking is involved in learning and Auguste Rodin's statue of the thinker is an immediately recognizable icon of intellectual activity. Had Rodin lived to the present age, possibly the thinker would be seated at a computer Please try the Test button to the left. On a slow machine the movement of the button is more visible and it is possible to see the button bounce off the edges of the box. With luck and practice it is possible to trick the button into positioning itself under the mouse. Then the mouse is no longer in the thinker's image, but in the button's image, so the button stops moving.

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My Experience Creating Websites

My first Web pages were written ten years ago when I was failing to get a master's degree at Trent university. I created four pages, each on a different server, namely:

•   the university's Dec,
•   a professor's Sun,
•   my ISP's Sun
•   another professor's NT

The pages were very simple. The only thing they did was to link to each other. The most interesting aspect of this network was that I had to install Borland's web server on port 81 of the NT as the prof. who owned it was messing about with port 80 and he didn't want me to touch it.

A non-commercial site of mine is JR-Miller.com. Various ladies in the 'States transcribe his books and I put them on line. It has some 7,000 web pages. All the pages are HTML 4.01 Transitional. Only after it had been in existence for a year or so did I start using style sheets.

Windsor-Restaurants.com was my first attempt to make money on the Web. It costs me $2.95USD per month and barely covers its costs. It also uses HTML 4.01 Transitional and has never been upgraded. Its big brother Ontario-Restaurants.com came later and also in the HTML 4.01 Transitional camp, but it did have style sheets from the outset. It too is in need of an overhaul. Despite this, probably because it has some 6,000 pages, Google sends it a couple of thousand visitors each month.

Jobs-Open.com is my latest major site. It uses HTML 4.01 Strict and style sheets. It is generated using PHP and MySQL. It will be updated to XHTML and a trivial use of Java script in the coming months. This is due to my new-found knowledge from attending this course.

The only Javascript on my sites, so far, is that required by Google. A few years ago only 60% of browsers had Javascript enabled, so it was difficult to justify any effort to learn and deploy websites intensively using Javascript.

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