Introduction

This “about” page is part of the consolidation of the Swanson website into HUGO.

We started to work on web pages in earnest in the mid-1990’s. A LOT has happened since then. The most recent issue with web page design has been the massive increase in phone (and other small-screen device) web surfing. This page has some randomly-scattered links that help describe our web environment. All of these tools and ideas have influenced our thinking. (Note that this, and many other pages have been created using HUGO, a static web creation system.)

Frames

NO Frames

NO Frames

We really don’t like to use frames. Some people hate them, others merely suggest that you don’t use them and Jakob Nielsen dislikes them, too (his article from 1996!)

CSS

Rather than hit our heads on frame design, we are now using more dynamic page interaction, where needed. In particular we continue to learn and use Javascript and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), but only where absolutely needed. With more viewers now using phones and other small screens, we have tried various CSS systems.

Graphics and Images

We process graphics for this site using various open source products. We run Linux (Ubuntu) on our computers. We no longer use Windows 7 and 8, but the following products are available on those systems, too.

  • ImageMagick

  • RawTherapee, for processing RAW format photos from our cameras)

  • GIMP

  • Some web work is done on an Android phone. The Snapseed app does a pretty good job of simple image manipulation.

Philosophy

We have always wanted our pages to load quickly and require a minimum of flashy features. When these words were first added to this page in 2015, there were a number of massive web pages (mostly from commercial sites) that were impossible to use on mobile devices (phones). That has not changed as of this writing in 2024. We are trying to stay away from that, and it seems that our design thoughts have now gone full circle from the days of poor bandwidth (and therefore simple web pages) to the existing situation of small screens and poor bandwidth (and therefore simple web pages!)

For more web page design and improvement ideas, look at Jakob Nielsen.

You can learn a lot about HTML and CSS at W3Schools.com

We found a useful bit of color-related help with the nice colorwheel online.

Web Design Awards

NO Awards

NO Awards

NO Web Design Awards Won by These Pages (That’s Fine With Us)!

Standards

Javascript and CSS are described elsewhere on this page. We try to abide by all standards, when we use these tools.

If we have to create content on the server server side, we use PHP.

Browsers

We used to not play favorites as to browsers, and we REALLY did not like the words “this page only works with (fill in the blank) browser”!!!

For primary web surfing, we are currently using Brave.

For testing, we run a variety of browsers to see if our page work is correct. We can also use plug-ins to simulate different screen sizes. A quick test on the phone is another way to be sure we handle all screen sizes.

Ideally, web pages should work with a completely text-based browser program. And, yes, there is one, AND it even runs on DOS (see link above).