Winner of 2003-2004 Golden Web Award
 

Hi Everyone,

After having attended the wonderful PSOA conference, I was frantically trying to catch up when I received the announcement that my site http://members.cox.net/artenzie has won the Golden Web Award for 2003-2004.

For those of you who remember, I had originally asked for input if an oriental theme web page design might be appealing in the current political climate.

Thanks for the encouragement to go for it, the hard work has paid off.

Nice going Enzie. I tried to create a web site and know how much work is involved. Very creative. Glad your hard work paid off.

Enzie, that's wonderful! You have every right to feel very proud. Congratulations!

Mike and Leslie,

Thank you for your kind words. It is a day by day learning experience and god only knows how many times I have deleted something by mistake or spend hours trying to figure out why something is not posting the way it should.

I have also created the Socal-ASOPA web site and wished there was some sort of entry where one could make a change in the index that automatically would update all the other pages.

If any one of you knows of such a magic tool please share this golden information.

Enzie, if you just want to change color or font or some other format you can use CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, but I suspect you want to attack the content more than the form.

When I cobbled together my first site (http://mauriceriver.igc.org ) in '96 it was definitely a process of trial and error and it looks pretty crude now. And my first portrait site was something I made myself, too. But I wanted a more professional look without having to spend the time relearning all that html, so I ended up paying a webmaster to redo it.

More power to you for putting up an award-winning site by yourself! Anyway, what is it that you want to change? I'll bet there are plenty of people here who could help you with shortcuts.

Leslie,

The biggest problem is with the drop down menu. When adding new members to the SoCal-ASOPA site through the drop down menu, the information does not get automatically posted on every page.

As I was working my way through all the html, I must have deleted something crucial and I have no clue to what that something might have been.

I like having control over the web pages, even if it means wanting to rip my hair out at moments of utter frustration. But as the saying goes "no pain-no gain". I don't really believe in that and prefer things handed over on a silver platter, but it just sounded good. :sunnysmil

Enzie, never having used a drop-down menu I'm not sure how they work, but can't you simply copy the code for the new version and paste it in the proper location in the rest of the pages? Then you have to upload them all again, but that still doesn't seem too hard.

Congratulations!

Congratulations! The site is very nice! I love the rich tapestry motif!

Dear Enzie,

It's very good news to hear about your award! Congratulations for such a successful website. You are so prolific and energetic, Enzie.

Best wishes,
Linda

Enzie,

I think you're talking about being able to add the same code to each file at the same point in each file? There's a freebie tool I used to use called XReplace (windows). I'd imagine you could still find it on shareware.com. It allows you to search through whatever files you specify for a string of text, and replace it with another string of text. It can do hundreds of a files at a time. The user interface is not all that intuitive, but once you learn it it can be a huge time saver if you have many static html files.

Regards,
Holly

Congratulations; it's a beautiful site. There might be an online user's group for the web-design package you used where you could post your question.

Thank you all for your words of praise, I truly appreciate it. Holly, thanks for the hint, I will do some surfing and see if I can find XReplace. If it works I will let you all know.

By the way, just because the site got picked does not mean it couldn't be improved. If you noticed something that could be improved let me know. I value your opinions and will check your tips out to see if it could make the site even more user friendly.

Congrats
 

You do good work Enzie, I especially like your son's portrait.

Jean

Enzie,

Macromedia's Dreamweaver is truly the only way to go. It's pricey at $300, but I bought mine on ebay for about $180. I avoided buying the academic edition simply because I didn't know if it was different than the regular one and didn't want to chance it.

In Dreamweaver, you set up a page template for those things that are common on every page such as a menu. You then change the template and every page using that template is then updated. Of course, you still have to load the changed pages to the server.

Cynthia

Enzie, when I tried to visit your website I got a message that I needed to download the newest Macromedia software, but even after that I still couldn't view your site with Safari, Apple's newest browser. It got to "loading 25/25" and hung up. It works on Netscape but it's very slow to load. Haven't tried it on IE yet. What I saw of it was gorgeous, though!

Dear Jean, Cynthia and Leslie thanks for the praise and advise.

I will have to have my husband look into Dreamweaver, it sure sounds that it would help a lot to make things go faster. Leslie, I am sorry to hear that you had such trouble. I left all the animated gifs and Flash gadgets off so that the pages would load for those who have slower systems, but as I see now some of the images must still be too large.

I am on Cox high speed internet and use a screen that's 14"x11", my stuff not only loads fast, but is oversized. So I end up with a lot of guessing and constant running back and forth to laptops and smaller screens of other family member's computers to try to figure out how others view the page layout. There is soooo much to learn and soooo little time!