There are a number of helpful books, useful web delivered services, and freely (or cheaply) downloaded programs that make creating a web site much more painless than just a few short months ago.

Additionally, there are a number of web sites that offer advice, tutorials, shareware software tools, code segments to ease your development time, and freely distributed clip art.

This web site is a collection of web technologies that revolve around Active Server Pages (from Microsoft), the HTML 4.0 standard (detailed by W3Org), Cascading Style Sheets (also by W3Org), and JavaScript 1.2 (detailed by Netscape). Many guiding ideas were found in the Yale Manual of Style. Further support was gained in an article by Jakob Nielsen in VARBusiness magazine.

The resulting set of guidelines may be summarized as follows:

• Simple layout (not too many graphics, no Macromedia FLASH, etc.)
• Consistent look and feel of the site (logo, footers, navigation bar links, etc. are always in the same place).
• All links work (ok, I try REAL HARD to make this one say true, but as the internet is always changing, it's not likely to be 100% on my or anybody else's site).
• HAVE CONTENT. Most of my pages, especially in my writings section, absolutely brim with stuff that I want to say.

To accomplish this I use the Active Server Page (or ASP) scripts to control the "look and feel" issues around this web site (building all of the graphics together to make the "frame" of orange around this text), I use the Cascading Style Sheet system (or CSS) to control the font sizes and colors, and use JavaScript (client side only) to enhance things where I think it is necessary and then leave the content to explicit pages. Additionally, I have other blocks of code that look through a flat text file to generate the site map to aid surfers in navigating around my site. This same file, additionally, provides for a site search capability and helps in the generation of all of the META tag laf.headers used on each and every page.

Using this methodology, I have several "look and feel" modules that can be interchanged on a moments notice to spruce up my web site. Below are several example pages for your amusement.

Style 1

Style 2

Style 3

Style 4

Style 5

Style 6