The WHY of this website:

We've owned one website, Next Door eStore, for several years. We plan to build our own store.... but life keeps on interfering and we've not made much progress. We've both learned to write HTML, taught initially by one of Joe Barta's tutorials (highly recommended), and we gained a lot of practice by writing ads that we published on eBay to generate sales. (As an aside, our eBay id is Golden_Valley, but we're currently idle - not selling anything.)

Like most things, there's a story behind why we decided we needed another website. Basically, we started coding the store site by hand, following our normal practice. Then, while on vacation, we saw what a nephew was accomplishing using an authoring tool - in his case the tool was FrontPage 2003. We were quite impressed with what he was doing and decided to look into authoring tools for ourselves. It turns out the the most widely used tool - Dreamweaver - is also the most expensive... by far. And FrontPage (because it is a Microsoft product?) is not very compliant to web standards. So we tried others. We downloaded and installed Nvu, an open-source (and free) authoring tool. A couple of weeks worth of trial proved to us that Nvu was surprisingly powerful. We worked through a couple of tutorials and went through their (embedded) user's guide.

Working with Nvu is what convinced us to create a new website; trying to experiment with new web pages while working through a sub-directory on our store website was an unnecessary complication. And the FTP part of Nvu seemed to create more problems than it solved, at least to newbies like us. So we started this website to give ourselves (and Nvu) a fair trial. And after considerable effort, and lots of hours spent, we've decided to abandon Nvu - and all web authoring tools - and go back to hand coding. We found ourselves having to do entirely too much cleanup of the code that Nvu generated and both of us chafed under the loss of overall control while trying to create HTML documents. That old saw about old dogs and new tricks, I suppose.

The second part of the story is where our other site is hosted. It's been at LowestHosting.com for a couple of years now. We've been pleased with their service and feel like we get a lot of value for their extremely low prices. So when we decided we wanted another site to experiment with, it was a no-brainer where to go. LowestHosting makes it quick, painless and relatively inexpensive to set up your own website. I've checked around a little and I've not seen anything to compare with what they offer for the prices they charge. (Recommended).

So that's the why... We will continue to use this site for experimenting and learning, but we will also dump our personal content here (and create more!). This should be a work in progress for some time to come.

Now for some techno-talk: this site was written to be compliant with XHTML 1.0 Strict standards and optimized for a 800x600 pixel display, but 1024x768 is better. We've checked that everything works correctly on Internet Explorer 6 & 7, Firefox 1.5 & 2.0 and Opera 9.0. Netscape 7.1 seems to work okay except for the balloons on the Home page. Older versions of Internet Explorer also have a problem with the Home Page menu balloons, so we've created an alternate Home Page for these - non compliant - browsers. We don't know how to set up - or work with - a Macintosh, so we're not sure what this site looks like viewed through an AppleWorld browser.