Web Philosophy This is where I get to say something about what I think about web design. To begin with, there are two kinds of web designers: the graphical, and the technical. There is no question in my mind: I'm technical! Both types have a place: and in an ideal world, both types should work on every site! Here I present some thoughts based on web sites I have been involved with. In most cases, you can click on the graphic to see the site. One other thought. The very act of showing and talking about these sites here is one additional service to my clients. Not only does this give you, the reader, an opportunity to find out about sites that you might not have known of otherwise, but this represents one small step toward web optimizing for these clients. Because in the world of web optimizing, it's the links into your site that are important - the links you provide to other sites are actually helping their web placement, not yours. The search engine bots look for other sites that link to you: and this helps your web presence. (828) 713-0535 helpdesk@leelehman.com PO Box 19185, Asheville NC 28815 All the images here are clickable links to websites that Lee has either designed, or administered.  The first site is my own - for astrology. I actually began to create my astrological website by 1997. Back then, with modem speeds and dial-up being the norm, the major concern was small graphics. So from the beginning, my site was very text-based. I used it as a place to provide resources for my particular expertise of classical astrology, and then later, to sell my books, cd's, and eventually, several types of astrological software. Along the way, first I learned how to use Paypal links, and then the Paypal shopping cart, and then I added a full-blown shopping cart. Eventually, the site was massive, but it looked - well, stodgy. I hired Daniel Will Harris to change the look - which he did. In the process of working with a very creative person, he also forced me to ask questions about the site that I hadn't thought about for years! "Language:" html, with Javascript and Joomla content manager piece. Agora shopping cart The next site I can only show you as a history lesson, because this version is no longer on the web. This is the design for the Kepler College website: kepler.edu. The website had originally been designed about ten years before. When it had originally been designed - well before the College opened in 2000 - everything on the page had been designed in html code. Menus are an absolute bear to do and maintain in html. When I began to work on the site in 2004, the College had gone through a name change, added new degree programs, and expanded the number of pages needed to explain the programs. Through the years, broken links and bad pages had accumulated. I realized that we had to eliminate the menu system, which had to be changed on every page every time a change was made. I substituted a Javascript-based menuing system. I also added more pictures than had been used in the past, and added a system of tables to describe major options. "Language:" html, with Javascript menus Finally, the maintenance on the Kepler site got to us. A primary functional difference between Kepler and my personal site is that, on my own site, I add information periodically, but very seldom eliminate anything. Changes occur at my own convenience. This contrasts sharply with a College, which has new courses each term, new deadlines, and changes to the course catalog. The issue at Kepler is not so much continually adding, as continually changing. This definitely required that we take a radical approach. Enid Newberg and I moved the site into Joomla, a content manager. One of the advantages of the content manager design is that it virtually eliminates bad links. It also makes it as easy to change content as to add to it. As Enid and I have a lot of responsibilities beyond the web site, we can allow others to add content, and we can minimize our time commitment. "Language:" Joomla content manager Pat Hinkley does a form of guided reflection called The Journey. She is the only accredited practitioner of this system in the Asheville area - or anywhere nearby, for that matter. While this was a relatively small job, it has an important story. When I was first contacted by Pat, I couldn't find her site because her name didn't show up on Google associated with her site - I got there by following her LinkedIn social profile. This is a very bad sign, when your own name doesn't work under Google! Why did it happen? Pat had developed her own site through a Mac host that was all graphic - the text had actually been incorporated into the graphic. Why did this happen? If your approach to the web is primarily graphical, then "plain old" html has a problem - it looks different on different web browsers. You can see part of this effect by taking your browser and deliberately widening and narrowing the window. On many sites, you'll watch the text and the graphics move around and assume different orientations. This drives a graphical person nuts. So several hosting sites hit upon the idea of converting the client's design to a single graphic incorporating text and image - no movement. But this is a problem that has been "solved" by html types of years. If you try that experiment on this site or Pat's site, you'll simply see the borders expand and contract - not the middle section where the text and graphics are unless you contract it far more than you'd really feel comfortable using anyway. And the downside of this "graphics only" format is that there is no text for a bot to find - hence, my Google dilemma. Parenthetically, I might add that the "graphics only" systems seem to also be designed to be difficult if not impossible to move from the hosting site to another site. Hmm. Anyway, my job for Pat was to convert her site to something the bots could find. If you go into Google now under her name, her own site now comes up #2. Why #2? The site that comes up #1 is the one for the system that she practices. Not only has that site been up a lot longer than Pat's (history pays off on Google), but it is a larger, broad-based site. These larger sites tend to be rewarded on Google - precisely the same reason we give Sheville.org advertisers about how they will get increased visibility listing on our site. I took over this project from Kathryn Bradley, who has designed web sites here in the Asheville area. The Log Cabins on Neil's Creek rental is located in Yancey County, only about an hour from Asheville. This is actually a very simple site - but the beauty of the site is its simplicity. However, since she designed it, there has been a change in ownership, lots of changes in the area, and increased use of broadband. Simple can be good. So I have updated the navigation system, added a new page, and added a video clip. The shot on the left shows Kathryn's basic design of the home page; on the right; the modifications.  One other thing: like many vacation rental sites, this one is dependent primarily on advertising through vacation rental property sites, which list properties by geographic region. Here's this same cabin's listing through VRBO. Because of this, web optimizing is not as significant an issue as with many other sites. "Language:" html  with video embedding Sheville.org is an e-zine for Western North Carolina that is also a web marketing resource for small businesses in the region. In 2006, the owners decided to do a web make-over from a site which was exclusively html with some flash graphics. Ann-Marie Dany did the actual conversion to php. My job has been to oversee the project, and then to jump in on maintaining the site. php has become popular among web designers because it has some pretty powerful features. In the case of Sheville, the major advantage to the conversion was to make it much easier to manage the content. So why not a content manager? The native capabilities of My-SQL databases, an integral part of most php applications, allows for much more control of how the content looks, when it is seen, and how it is seen. However, like the typical php site, php is a language that works within html: php statements are "called" by the html program. That's all the "up" side. A site like Sheville.org is changing daily, and that means that html "code" is being added daily. It's cut the amount of work to do any particular task, but it has also opened up the doors for more to be done. And best of all, I have been able to train one of the other principals to be able to do a lot of the routine information posting through phpMyAdmin. She is a nontechnical person, but has found that the ability to add copy and make changes to copy on her own site is a tremendously liberating experience for a person who is very conscious about the importance of the written word. This also completely matches with my philosophy that site owners should have as much control as possible over the content in a site. "Language:" php, with html. Calendar module purchased. Banner ads through phpAds. Forums through free module from domain host. This is an example of a small job - but vital, from the standpoint of the domain site owner.  Ol' Turtle Farm had been located in Massachusetts, but the folks moved here to Western North Carolina. I was hired to update the address, phone and pictures. An easy job on the surface - but, as often happens, the original designer had created the site using a combination of Javascript and css - a combination that, frankly, was overkill, since the site is hardly complex enough to justify it. Why did he do it that way? I can only speculate. But from the standpoint of the business owner, it meant that I could not do all the re-formatting she would have liked without going seriously over-budget. So we did the best we could, within her preferred price tag. "Language:" html and Javascript/css One really cool thing in the Asheville area is the women's chorus, Womansong. They have concerts several times a year, and they are absolutely fun. I was recently asked to help them do a little bit of re-design on their site. The site had been set up, and then left for chorus members to maintain - and with varying degrees of computer skills. They didn't have the money to spend much on site re-design, so I focussed my attention on a couple of critical issues. The biggest was the use of color: the old design seemed to have the idea that the more different shades on a page, the better. The other part about the color was there was a lot of light font on dark background, something that is very difficult to read. I switched to light backgrounds. The other thing about the re-design was removing some layers of complexity, and standardizing page look and action. A number of the pages had no page title, the menus didn't consistently work, there was no "home" option on the menu (I created that by using the Womansong logo as clickable) and there were too many embedded tables. I also added a Paypal shopping cart, which has considerably increased ticket sales, and made their cds much easier to buy between concerts. "Language:" html. Paypal shopping cart. The group certainly understood that my solution above was just that - a stopgap until they could focus their attention on getting the job done right. I advised them to look at sites and find some that they liked, and then we could discuss them and come to understand what design elements they wanted. They put together several committees. and really did it right. Of course - great photography also helped! "Language:" html with flash. Paypal shopping cart. One of the progressive trends about the Asheville area is the growth in interest in green building. Green building requires green materials, and that's where Build It Naturally comes in. I was actually the third web designer to come into this project: a fact that is not unusual. The initial design of the site was by a guy who was visually extremely talented, but by his own admission, didn't know web design - just good visual design. So the website began with a very good look, but not enough content - and not much in the way of a robust understructure. Also, since web design was not this person's business, that meant that he was unavailable to upgrade the site, as inevitably, Build It Naturally expanded in product offerings. The second designed began beta testing, but primarily this web designer focused on such matters as a newsletter and forum interactions. These are great concepts: but web designers sometimes forget that someone has to maintain the blogs, and forums and newsletters - and in a small business, that someone is all too likely to be the owner, who is already overworked just running the business. So my job was to come in and extend design #1. While I may not know the green building business as well as the owner, I do have a background in writing, and five books under my belt, so I worked with her to develop text and visuals to keep the great look of the original design, but with more content and visuals. "Language:" html, with Javascript and css In 2007, Sheville instituted a real estate page to allow real estate brokers, agents, as well as individuals to showcase their properties through the site, which attracts a lot of future Western North Carolina residents, as well as many already living here. As usual, we wanted the flexibility to work with people with varying degrees of web capabilities. The larger real estate firms may have their own in- house web design people: but often, individual sites created by them lack any of the personal look, information or sense that makes a house a home, or a property something other than just a commodity. On the other end, many people selling homes have no particular computer skills at all. So I have been creating a series of sites to sell properties. They are generally quite simple. As with all sites, the text and the pictures are key: and we encourage people to really get involved in their sites, in order to make them something unique. Obviously, we can hook these pages to an MLS listing, fsbo listing, or other sites as well. One variation shown in this site is the use of a frame to show pictures. In most cases, frames are used in websites for creating navigational zones. Here, however, I used one to allow multiple pictures: more than would show on a screen of the site otherwise. Often, flash files are used for the same purpose of allowing multiple pictures. But with flash, the sequence and timing are fixed, and some people react badly to pictures flashing at them from a site. In this case, the viewer has control over the viewing.  Also, I added the use of video clips, which give added perspective to the potential buyer. "Language:" html, with frames Heather Rose moved from South Florida to Massachusetts in 2008, leaving her job at a large company in a major metropolitan area and moving to a small town. She decided to set up a consulting business and contacted me to do her web site. She decided to name her consulting firm after her birthstone. This is a pretty straight-forward design that can be developed at a very affordable price. Why? 1. There are relatively few pages 2. There are practically no graphics 3. The downloadable files were all prepared and delivered in their final formats 4. Heather wrote the text herself, so I only had to cut and paste. “Language:” html Ward Parks is a guy with a passion and a vision. His passion is for his spiritual practice as a devotee of the late Meher Baba. Ward was so committed to this that he left his "safe" teaching job to immerse himself completely in his practice, using his skills as a songwriter as an offering to the Meher Baba community. When I met Ward and was asked to to this site for him, there were several considerations. The first is that this is not a site which is going to sell millions: I had to keep costs down for this to be a viable option for him. The second was he needed to have audio clips, so that other Baba devotees could sample before buying. The third was that people needed to be able to buy products cheaply. As for the rest, I created audio clips using Sony Soundforge®, and built the site around the cd's that he has released. I thought to use the cd covers themselves as navigation buttons. The rose background is a specific Baba motif, although the actual rose in the background grows in my garden. As a design feature, I used his record covers as his navigation bar. "Language:" html. I am illustrating one other kind of website here: one that actually "comes" as part of many web- hosting packages. This shows a program suite called Moodle, which is technically known as open- source course ware. As a College professor, I have been working with course software for a number of years: these are the suites that allow you to put your course material on-line, and then interact with the students. What you may not have thought about is that this same courseware system can be used in any teaching environment. It is generally free in any Unix-based hosting package. While a certain amount of programming knowledge is helpful, this is actually designed to allow a fairly novice user to design and implement courses and teaching environments. You control what is on the site, and you control who is "enrolled." A good thing to know about!