Technical information about this site
Initial setup and design
On 29th September 2000, we made our initial design. The site is developped on a slow 333 MHz Pentium. For maintaining the page we use Microsoft FrontPage 2000.
Although we knew the problems that search engines have with page frames we choose to use them. That means on the left side of the browser the user will always have access to our main pages. Even a link page will appear within our site.
We choose to make our own FrontPage theme by developping buttons, bullets and banner using CorelDRAW 8.0. This was not a very easy task. We copied the objects from an existing theme into Corel just to get size information. Then we made our own objects, exported them as either GIF or JPEG in 150dpi, 8-bit colour mode. For the compression mode we experimented a bit to find the right byte size. They are still too big in size, e.g. the bullets. Also the byte size is still to much.
Some logos and headlines have been done with either CorelDRAW or Adobe PhotoShop 5.0.
Some HTML scripts have been pasted from other websites.
The HotPress releases are sent to us by e-mail from an official spokes person of the People's Coalition Government. We receive them somehow wrongly formatted in our odd Eudora Light. We do not alter any text but use copy/paste to paste the text content on a new page. Then we format them in Courier New 10 point, because it is an easy readable font. Other fonts used in the website are Verdana and Korinna (the later will later probably be replaced - it is not THAT good readable).
From the beginning, we tried to make SPEED an issue. We use graphics and photos sparingly to make download times faster. We also think that the text content of our web site is more interesting to a visitor than a fancy design.
Only in the Links page, we have used extensively logos etc. of the linked sites/pages. A visitor associates a logo easier with a particular site.
Some pages have a shared top border, but all have a shared bottom border.
On 6th October we posted the site for the first time using the Publish Web function of FrontPage. We also uploaded some test pages using BulletProof FTP software.
We are hosting at Internet Services, Fiji's only ISP. Their main problem is the international back-bone link, which is a rather slow and packed leased line from FINTEL.
For statistics and the inevitable counter, we are using www.thecounter.com. It is still the best - and after a few @#*%&!*, it worked even at our frame-based page.
Problem with subwebs
FrontPage 2000 offers a nice Wizard to make a protected discussion-list web site. We create such a web and tried to host it as subweb. However, it looks that we have no permission from the hosting site to do that. Hopefully, we can find a remedy soon.
FrontPage training
On Saturday, 14 October 2000, we organised a training session for some of the key players (three ministers, one senator) that will be contributing to this web site. After explaining how the web site works and some design considerations, participants learned how to implement new pages using Microsoft FrontPage 2000.
Authorisation for articles and links
On Monday and Tuesday, 16/17 October 2000, we asked several organisations, individuals and foreign newscasters for their permission to publish links to their web site or to incorporate information from their web directly in our site (the latter is preferred, since download times for the Fiji audience is crucial that someone stays on our site).
Registration with search engines etc.
On Wednesday, 18 October we submitted a few of our web pages to AltaVista and Lycos. Prior to that we made sure to have a proper title, and meta-tags for keywords and description (anyone knows how to automate that process in FP2000? It is the same headacke than find/replace where one has to create a task for each page - what a bull!).
Later we used www.doog.com, that submits to 17 engines for free. In addition, we also went to www.ineedhits.com. There you can select around 25 engines or link pages (we only used around 12). It is also free (but DOOG was faster). If I am not mistaken, we submitted to the following (don't really know if the links will work):
Incorporation of a search engine on our page
On 22nd October we tried to incorporate the FAST search engine. It would have worked fine. However, we deleted it again after we found out that the search engine leaves our website, i.e. it does not run within a frame.
Training of new webmaster(s)
On a particular Saturday in November, we organized FrontPage and Internet training for the new "webmasters". In addition, we compiled a user manual showing how the web site should be updated and enhanced. Four ministers and a senator attended the training.
Move website to another PC
Also in November 2000, we moved the website from the PC of the interim webmaster to a new machine. This was a very horrible task. We used WINZIP to take the original site over. Then we used FrontPage's Import feature to import the existing site. However, all navigation was lost. We had to manually redo it again from scratch (very annoying, Microsoft, please improve the import function!).
Titles of news pages got lost
Early January 2001, we discovered that the titles in the orange banner are no longer appearing. On Saturday. 20/1/2001 we made sure that they work again. We also found out that by mistake the shared bottom border had disappeared.
Change of fonts
Both Internet Explorer 5.x and Navigator 5 are good browsers. Not sure about the second one, but IE5 has a feature that displays fonts even if they do not exist on the target machine. However, IE3 and older browsers only support fonts stored on the hard disk. We therefore changed Korinna to Verdana, a font supplied by default with Windows.