Notes and Directions
Since no one is paying me to keep this site up, it sometimes is "in transition" when I've thought about changes, and instituted them in one part of the site to evaluate whether it does what I want it to before using it throughout the site.
These design notes are an attempt to keep my thoughts in one place, provide an explanation of inconsistencies within this section of the site, and give an idea of design tenets behinds its development.
Drop me a line if something is unclear, or if something isn't working right.
-- Jim
Last Update: 12/21/02
Please note:
All Images ©Jim Edgar
No reuse of any kind allowed without specific permission. Thanks.
T&J&T
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ORCHID
SITE NOTES
(This page will probably always be under development
- It runs in reverse chronological order, with the most recent postings beginning
immediately below this sentance.)
12/20/02 - Amazement at the dormancy of the pages...
I've been dutifully snapping photos of the orchids, but with work and other design jobs, these pages have pretty much lain dormant for the past year. How embarrasing... At any rate, since rains of biblical proportions have been hitting the area, I've started to dip back into the folders of photos and notes.
10/06/01 - General tuneup of annoying little things
Starting with the Main Orchid Page, I tightened up the graphic layout of some pages, and added some navigational helpers on some of the pop-up pages. For example, I've added the javascript goodie:
To close this pop-up window, click here
because I had set up some links which put you into the middle of a pop-up page, with little clue as to where you were or how you got there. An example of this was from the link to Jim's Ill-Advised Potting Medium which originally did not have the "close" line on it.
Also, I changed the Main Orchid Page layout to a double column of orchids, as I am about to add in the 8 newcomers. Originally, there were few enough orchids that scrolling down through them wasn't a huge hassle. The double column will work for a while, but not forever...
There were a few little fixes and tune-ups to correct navigational assumptions from earlier. As the site has expanded, this has been one of my ongoing concerns. This site has grown more or less organically, so it has certainly contained its set of idiosyncrasies. After I add in the newcomers, I will assess the presentation in a "top-down" manner.
Design Challenge: 9/20/01 - Pages Will Become Too Long
Since the "notes" part of each orchid's page are not likely to get shorter over time, they will continue to expand vertically. I've actually been thinking about this for some time, as each addition of written notes and "Record" shots pushes down the bottom of the pages by 500 pixels or so each time. I'm experimenting with Orchid #009's page right now, to determine the best way to break things up. I'm guessing that the main page should be mostly bloom photos and "overview" information, and people who want to find out more about the history will do so by following the trail to deeper pages.
Design Constraints/Direction for this Site
I wanted to create a site to show my orchids, obviously. But, I also wanted to show the process of growing orchids, in addition to the (hoped-for) results.
A number of other's orchid sites show beautiful plants and spotless blooms, and I found myself wondering if they had troubles along the way. I guess for many, that's what the dumpster is for (or the "Green Can", if you live in our neighborhood...). Nevertheless, I thought it would help me to pull my written notes together so I could refer to them easily, and that maybe, once I got some plants happily growing along, others might learn from my errors as well.
Conventions used on this Site
Full sized photos
will appear in separate windows.
Reason: Decreased load times of pages. Using a thumbnailed version makes approximately
2 - 4k base images. Original page doesn't have to reload when using "BACK"
button. I will probably shift to a "Chromeless"
window, geared to the size of the photos, but that is a future project.
Tools Used to Develop this Site
I learned the basics of HTML coding through a couple of books - I think one was "Learn HTML in 30 Days" by Lemay - and developed my original sites by hand coding them. So, I have some familiarity with HTML.
There are good reasons to learn the ins and outs of HTML, and several good resources on the web - if you are interested, I'm sure you've heard of most of these:
Very incomplete quick list of References/Resources
Finally retiring my Mac II VX in fall of 2000 (well, I had been using a PowerMac 8500 at work for most stuff since about 1995), we upgraded to a Mac G4 Cube for webdesign & graphic design. The nicest thing about this computer is it brought me back to the days of the old Macintosh quiet operation. You don't realize how annoying the consistently whirring fans are until you don't hear them. It's quiet, fast, stable and has been great. You should have gotten one while they were available...
I've been using DreamWeaver (3.0 as of this writing) for the site design, and coaxing it to do some things that I've learned by editing the HTML directly. This has worked pretty well, and allowed me to integrate some more advanced design ideas without spending a long time writing code.
Other programs which have been pretty web-indespensible include:
BBEdit (what I used in all early hand-coding - also available freeware as BBEdit Lite)
PhotoShop (nothing surprising there...)
ImageReady (only because I needed something under a fast approaching deadline, and started using that first...)
Illustrator (again, an industry standard)
Design-wise, I've used Quark Xpress since about 2.0, but that's not really the topic of discussion here.
Because of the way we bought the software (Design Suites/Bundles), we've ended up with Freehand, Fireworks & Flash from Macromedia, and Acrobat & Pagemaker from Adobe. I've been chipping away at all of those except for Pagemaker, which I simply can't see myself using unless Quark goes away. FWIW - Acrobat has been a slick little program I've used to make flyers available for downloads on a few of the commercial sites I maintain. It's a very effective way to get from a nice Quark document onto the web with a minimum of fuss.
Browser Notes
All pages are tested as viewable with Netscape Communicator 4.7 and Internet Explorer 5.0 on a Mac G4. They are additionally viewed via Windows machines (variously 95, 98, NT) via IE 5.0, and America Online 5.0 browsers. Some design features (javascript mouseover text color changes for example), only appear in IE5.x and up.
The Windows machines tend to prompt you for confirmation if you use a "closewindow" javascript.
Some rollover functions do not appear to work on AOL.
Chromeless - a window which appears without any of the typical browser garbage - no navigation bars, favorite tabs, etc... Click on the link below to see a quick example.
This should open a chromeless window with no scrollbars. (Might not work in Netscape)