The first version of the District 104 website went live in late summer of 1998. While the site has been revised a number of times in respect to form and content, the current appearance has been in use for about two years now. Why has there not been a major evolution since then? Why is it a relatively plain site? The answer to the first question is that more care was taken the last time around to build a site that was easy to modify and accessible to more users. The overall layout is cleaner than ever, text resizing is available, and many links and images have alternate text tags so that the content comes through whether one is using the latest graphical browser or a text browser such as Lynx. To minimize loading times and the burden on our machines (which all default to the district home page), the layout is kept clean and free of complicated menus, animations, java, etc.
Some javascript code is used throughout the site, especially for menus (creators of the code are cited in the header of the pages). CSS is used extensively for formatting color and text, which also allows for the aforementioned ability to resize text as well as setting up a cleaner version of pages for printing.
Why do pages end with .shtml? This allows for external files to be loaded into the page; all of the navigation at the top is handled this way, as well as the copyright section at the bottom left column of most pages. This way, if some aspect of the navigation is changed it only has to be done once.
Almost all of the pages by hand using the CuteHTML text editor. If something better may come along, we will be happy when it does.
The initial set-up of pages is to ensure consistency in the site design. The only pages that aren't coded by hand are the majority of photo album pages, which are created in Adobe PhotoShop.
Several blogs appear throughout the site. our hopes are for the use the blogs as an educational tool, but for now, they are used here in more practical ways.