The home page is now even less cluttered. Some may say that in its original form it was like some old fashioned children's book. Dare I say it, perhaps it now looks more contemporary.
A major contributor to this de-cluttering is the introduction of an 'accordion' courtesy of Taco HTML Edit. This allows the page content to change at the click of a heading.
The page opens with membership information. A click on the EVENTS heading below, up pops event information and so on.
However, cosmetics apart, the most radical changes are unseen. The homepage has been totally recoded.
The site was originally built using a now defunct program from Microsoft, Front Page. This is a much maligned but quite brilliant program that, providing they are kept fairly simple, allows pages to be built from scratch without any need to look at the underlying code, thus making it all very easy without the need for language learning. But if you want to introduce anything out of the 'ordinary' then, unlike the Apple equivalent, iWeb, it allows you to get into the code and make changes there. Thus the drop down menu system and the slide shows etc..
However the code that Front Page produces is poor in the extreme, producing as it does huge files full of unnecessary repeated instruction. This doesn't matter really except that the bigger the file the longer it takes to download and when it comes to making those tweaks hunting through swathes of repetitive code is a real bore, especially when the tweak is to be made throughout the entire site.
So although Front Page still has its uses, the home page has been rewritten from scratch without it, digging deeper into code than ever before. I have also written a separate style script driving the page's format, the font, colour, element positioning etc.. Something I have been trying to learn for some time but which for some reason has 'till now always proved a step too far.
This I intend to develop as the hub of the entire site providing a site wide uniformity and the ability to make change by just adjusting the style sheet without touching any page. So, for example, the background colour of every page could be changed with just a one word change in the style sheet.
I thought this breakthrough fantastic but I have also managed to write a separate javascript routine that can be called to insert the pictorial side menu that appears on every page. This means should it need adjusting I can make the change in just one file with the effect appearing in every page instantaneously.
The same can be done for any piece of code that appears in all or many pages.
This is no doubt all old hat for professional website designers but not bad I think for a self taught, washed up old .... like me.
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