interactive web sites

1. Language and Layout

• Since 1998 I have been creating and publishing web sites that educate and inform people, as well as help people communicate and share information with each other.
• You may be surprised to see how inexpensive it can be to have a simply formatted, attractive and engaging web site.
• Please either email us, fill out this form, or see our contact information below.
• You can have several pages of text and photographs laid out for you, for under $100, and they can be on the internet for less than $10 per month.
• For this low monthly fee, your web site can be hosted on a shared web server. This just means that we put your web site on the same computer with several other web sites. Your site will be connected to the web with a very fast T1 line, be available 24-7, and have a guarantee of 99.9 percent uptime.
• There are 2 things that influence the cost per month of this kind of service: (1) the size of your web site (in megabytes), that is, the amount of space it takes up on a disk drive, and perhaps more importantly, (2) the bandwidth of the web site, that is, the number of megabytes (or even gigabytes) per month that gets transmitted to web site visitors. The bandwidth per month depends upon the number of visitors per month and the number and size of the pages that they visit per month. The size and bandwidth that you can get for $10 or less per month, is a very generous amount. Very few sites will cost more. However you should know that if your site has a really huge numbers of visitors, or has lots and lots of video media or audio media, it may cost more.
• Another alternative to a shared web server is to own your own web server. You will need a suitable computer with web server software installed on it, plus you will need an appropriate connection to the web, such as a T1 line or business class broadband service. However if you want your web site to be available 24/7, you will have to leave the computer on all day and all night; you will have to do some form of babysitting for this computer to make sure the computer and its sofware is functioning 24-7; and you will need to have a backup computer, for times when the primary computer just can't be on-line. This is impractical for many busy people. And the extra cost of business class broadband service is more than the $10 per month needed to have your site hosted on a shared web server using a T1 line — which is much faster than business class broadband.
• I have a knack for presenting information and ideas in a way that is readily understandable. For an example, see OurHernias.org.
• I don't claim to be a graphic artist, but I compose pages in ways that most people seem to think are attractive, and engaging — with text, graphics, and media, and hyperlinks.
• In short, I believe you will find my web presentations to be simple, attractive, organized, and readily understandable.
• If you want your site to have a slick, polished look, I can keep design costs down by using pre-made templates, and customizing them for your purposes. Or you may think that an original design, created for you from scratch (such as the page you are looking at), may have more character and generate more interest, and that your audience will connect better to a totally original site. As long as it is not too complicated, an original design can also be very low in cost.
• While sometimes WYSIWYG page editing programs can be useful, I have a good deal of page-markup skill, and am able to format web pages very precisely, using html (hypertext markup language) and, in addition, css (cascading style sheets). Even the best WYSIWG editing program cannot provide as much control over page layout as someone with good markup skills. And WYSIWG is not always faster, either.
• With hyperlinks, and JavaScript menus (there is a JavaScript menu at the head of this page), I can link pages together systematically so that visitors can find things easily.
• Since, for certain aspects of page design, I now use the newer css page-layout methods in addition to the older html methods, you are assured that adding more pages to your web site in the future — pages that have layouts and page-designs that are in the same style as the existing layouts and designs — will be less time-consuming and less expensive. Also, with css, changes to layout, type-styles, and page-formatting, can made for a whole set of pages all at once, instead of needing to be done page by page.
• If your are interested in the tools I use: I do page markup and page layout, with html and css, using Dreamweaver's code-entry screen. I crop, size, and optimize photos for quick transmission and clear display, with Photoshop.
• Inexperienced web site designers often neglect to properly optimize photos and drawings, resulting in pages that take excessive amounts of time to load. I optimize photos and drawings for the fastest download speed without visible loss of resolution (using Photoshop). Pages with properly optimized photos may download and display dramatically faster.
• Printers usually have greater resolution than video display monitors. We are talking 600 dots per inch or 1200 dots per inch, or more, instead of roughly 70 to 120 dots per inch of a CRT or LCD video display. If you expect website visitors to print a photo, in the detail that their printer is capable of, you will want to have a separate printer version of the photo, optimized for printout, that the visitor can choose, in addition to the screen version. I optimize these photos, for printers, with Photoshop. Inexperienced web site designers may neglect to do this.
• I also use Photoshop to touch up photos, and improve contrast and color balance.
• I make and edit drawings, using Inkscape.
• I create interactive features, such as forms, guest books, message boards, pages customized for the particular visitor, and calculations from user input, using my basic knowledge of php, Perl, MySQL, JavaScript.
• I do some sketching; see my caricature of a piano at the top of this page; I was done with pen and ink. I also have education in mechanical drawing.
• Web sites may contain various kinds of media in addition to basic text and graphic media, such as: video media, audio media, video animations, and representations of 3-dimensional objects that can appear to be rotated on-screen.
• If you have a big project, I can work with, and put together the work of, graphic artists, musicians, and various multimedia artists.
• One of the interactive elements that many web sites can benefit from are on-screen forms. In addition to designing forms, I can write programs that (1) grab the information that website visitors put into the forms, and (2) drop that information into databases — databases that can hold large amounts of information from a large number of website visitors.
• In addition to (1) putting data into website databases, I can (2) retrieve data from website databases, and (3) organize the retrieval and display in an infinite variety of ways. I use the programming languages php (as far as I know it doesn't stand for anything) and SQL (Structured Query Language), to get information into and out of databases, accessed via a MySQL database server.

2. Publishing and Publicizing

• I like to view creating your web site as a project that has 3 aspects:
  1. Finding or developing content. This includes the selection or creation of the page elements such as text, graphics, and "multimedia" elements.
  2. The construction of your web site, that is, the technical aspects of positioning all these page elements on various pages, and linking pages together, and
  3. The publishing of your web site: getting your web site to the public. I divide publishing your web site into 2 parts:
     1. technical aspects: selecting web server hardware and software, "uploading" web pages onto the web server, and arranging for the web server to be physically accessible to the internet-using public. This includes registering a domain name, and arranging for the domain name to work with the web server.
     2. marketing aspects: publicizing your web site by arranging with various webmasters for them to put links to your website, on their web sites, and by advertising your web site in other media, such as print media, or broadcast media. Submitting your web site to search engines is only a small part of publicizing your web site, and may not even be necessary; these days, search engines will tend to find your site by themselves. Submitting your site to on-line directories where humans pick and choose which sites to link to and which sites to ignore, is part of the job.
• For many web sites, I may be able to handle all of these three aspects of website creation, content, construction, and publishing; for larger or relatively complex web sites, labor may be divided among several people or companies. I may, with the help of graphic artists, format web pages with text, graphics, and multimedia elements, link pages together, and then put them on a web server. Individual page elements may be created by writers, photographers, graphic artists, musicians, and videographers; page layouts may be handled by graphic artists; getting information from forms and into and out of databases may be handled by programmers; and publicity may be handled by publicists. As a website developer I can supervise all the contributors.
• Publishing: I know how to find dependable hosting companies with reliable web servers, for your site.
• Construction and technicalities of publishing: I know the technicalities of getting the page elements onto pages, and pages onto web servers, and of making sure the pages display as intended, and that they link together as intended.
• Publishing: I have some talent for persuading people to put links to your web site, on their web site.
• Publishing: making sure that your site is listed by search engines is an easy job these days. It is no longer necessary to submit your site to search engines; a search engine's crawlers will tend to find your site, and list it, even if you don't submit it to them. Yup. I'm not kidding you. So do not be fooled into paying a company a large fee for what turns out to be simply submitting your site to lots of search engines.
• However it is still important to make good choices for the keyword metadata and description metadata, that, among other things, search engines will use when deciding how your site is indexed and listed, when deciding what search words will call up which of your pages, and when deciding how to order your page, relative to all the other pages that are called up by the same search word. I know how to choose keywords and descriptions to get optimal listings from search engines.

3. Personal Persuasion

• I like to persuade people to make personal, political, and social changes. I do this both as a personal hobby, and in behalf of organized groups with worthwhile goals.
• I have persuaded people to make political and social change by writing letters, telephoning, door-to-door canvassing, and speaking to groups, as well as by using the web. See this, regarding dental care.
• I have done door-to-door canvassing to get support for a bill to improve public health by regulating certain environmental conditions in public places. I have written legislators, and spoken at legislative hearings, regarding the same issue.
• I have made phone calls to persuade people to vote for political candidates.

4. Giving and Taking: Sites that Gather, Store, and Organize Information as well as Provide Information

• Through a simple screen presentation, huge amounts of information can be moved into, and out of, on-line databases. Being able to easily manipulate huge amounts of information is one of the things that makes computers so astonishingly useful, isn't it?
• Information can be gathered by (1) asking website visitors to enter information into forms, and (2) automatically, from the computers of website visitors.
• Here is an example of a form that we might ask a website visitor to fill out. A Perl program extracts information from the form, and acts on it. See the link to find out how.
• Automatically gathered information can include (1) what web site, and what web page, any visitor was at when he or she clicked on a link to your site, (2) what pages at your site a particular visitor visited, and when, (3) what links on your site they clicked on, that took them to another site, (4) what browser they used to view your site, and (5) what ISP they used, and in what state or country their ISP was located.
• Here is an example of an interactive website feature that utilizes an on-line database to store a large volume of data. It is a discussion board. It uses php and SQL to enable visitors to put information into a MySQL database, and retrieve it.

5. Summarization: some of the tools we can use to create or contribute to your web site:

• For page layout we, of course, use HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). We also use Macromedia Dreamweaver.
• We know a bit of Perl, php and JavaScript programming, Common Gateway Interface (CGI) protocols, and can set up Server-Side Includes (SSI) within web pages.
• We are familiar with Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Adobe Photoshop, Inkscape, and Microsoft Access.
• We have learned enough JavaScript to create fantastic drop-down menus. There is a sample at the top of this page. There is also one here, and here. Simple text menus are shown, but menus can be made from graphic elements, as well. Thus menus can have custom-designed three-dimensional "buttons" to press, can have photographs, and can have advanced "hover" attributes. It is just a matter of a little more time.
• If you include your email address when you fill out this form (and take the time to answer some silly questions) — you will be able to see a little of what we can do in regard to arranging automatic email responses to whatever people put in an on-line form. The same techniques apply, whether the questions and responses are silly or serious.
• Whatever you enter into the form can be read and responded to by a human, as well as by a computer — so you can also use the form to request a personal response from us. Just put any questions you have for the human, in the box entitled "how can we help you?

6. Special Offers

Discussion boards. Leafy Green can provide complete setup and full support for message boards, discussion forums — with all the programming and data located right on your web site — where you have full control.

We can help you select which program meets your needs, and then we can set it up for you, and customize the appearance and operation of the program. We can coax it into stylistic harmony with the rest of your web site.

I think many people will agree that it is generally far better, for a number of reasons, to have an discussion board right on your web site, than to use an outsourced board. For starters, keeping backups of the messages on an outsourced board is often not practical. Also, the operator of the outside site where the outsourced message board is, can load up every message board page with lots of advertising; however if the board is on your own site, you can set the board up without advertising, or you can set up a system for controlling advertising yourself, and for receiving revenues from advertisers — yourself. To see a basic board that we set up, click here.

DropDown Menus. There is a sample here, and another here. These are small menus, with text only. We can make very elaborate menus; we can easily make fancy-looking buttons to depress. These just require more time.

You can easily have the same menu on multiple pages. We just put a short javascript code (that we can supply) on each page. Then, if you change the menu, the changes are visible on every page that displays the menu. You can also have the particular page you are on, automatically highlighted on the menu.

Such menus can be made from graphic elements, as well as text elements. These include custom-designed "buttons" to press, and buttons with advanced "hover" attributes. It is just a matter of a little more time. Graphics, probably millions of them, can be found in "clip-art" catalogues, or you can have a graphic designer create custom graphics for us to include in the menu.

7. Portfolio

see some examples of websites or pages we created or contributed to

8. Other WebSite Notes

9. Other Services

10. In Brief