Javascript Menu by Deluxe-Menu.com

Our Website

Red Rover, Red Rover, Send Tige Over
Last Changed 10/5/2019
We have had several inquiries on how we generate our web site so we decided to list some of the tools we use.

Web Host

justhodt To start, our web site is Hosted on a shared server at justhost.com.  We had been with switched to justhost.com from 1&1 when we had some issues with another website we were developing after almost 12 years. 1&1 provided good service for our HTML websites but when we wanted to build a Drupal website, the 1&1 shared-hosting implementation did not work for us.

The support we have received from justhost.com has been very good as we encountered s few differences in the justhost.com implementation.

We current host eight domains and three sub-domains. Justhost.com is very cost effective us allowing us to have web sites without annoying pop-up ads.

E-Mail

justhost One of the advantages of having our own domain names (dmbruss.com and others) is that we have e-mail addresses that are independent of the ISPs that we have been with over the last several years.  We have had to change ISPs for several reasons but our e-mail stayed the same.

An advantage of using justhost.com for our e-mail is that justhost.com offers an alternative to IP Port 25.  To those who run into the problem, many ISPs control IP Port 25 so that you can only send e-mail through the ISP's mail server. This may not sound like much of a problem unless you use a mail client like Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express and you are using one of those lock-down ISPs as a guest like Wi-Fi at an RV Park.  By providing alternative IP Ports for e-mail, justhost.com enables you to use a local mail client and not worry about the ISP you are connecting through.

Justhost.com has POP3 and IMAP client email access.  IMAP can be useful for people who normally use multiple PCs and would like to access their e-mail for all of them.  IMAP keeps a copy of a message on the server until the user directs it to be deleted.  Few e-mail servers offer IMAP.

Of course Justhost.com has provisions for web-based e-mail access for those times you want to access your mail via someone else's PC.

Web Editing Software

Coffee Cup HTML Originally our web sites were created and edited with Microsoft FrontPage.  FrontPage did an excellent job for us.  FrontPage provided for simple sites up to very complex like www.dmbruss.com had become.

In early 2007, Microsoft decided to decommit FrontPage.  While FrontPage has several very user friendly features, those very user friendly features also made web sites that deviated from the accepted standards for Internet web sites.

The follow-on product from Microsoft is called Expression Web.  The first reaction to Expression Web was Ouch.  Two of the user friendly features of FrontPage had been removed, navigation buttons and photo galleries.

After finding some add-on tools to handle those missing features, we have gotten used to Expression Web and now understand why Microsoft decided to make a move to a standards driven editing tool.  We found numerous inconsistencies is our layouts, picture formatting and numerous other things that we though we had standardized.  After a whole lot of effort, we feel we are much closer to having a consistent look and feel for the web site.

When we moved into our Cottage and added 27" 4K monitors to the PC, we found an operational flaw in Expression Web, the inability to zoom the Design window. After searching a few options, we settled on CoffeeCup HTML Editor.  CoffeeCup lacks some of the functionality of Expression Web and has some additional functions.  But CoffeeCup HTML Editor can display the webpage being worked with our 4K monitors.

Menu Tool

As stated above, one of the things missing in Expression Web that was provided by FrontPage was navigation buttons.  All you had to do was link one web page to another and FrontPage would generate a navigation button for that page.  While easy, this was also limited to a page being link to only one page in that navigation structure.

We went through a couple of software tools trying to replace the FrontPage navigation buttons.  We finally settled on Deluxe Menus.  The process of generating the navigation menus is not automatic but the Deluxe Menu windows tool, Deluxe Tuner, makes it very easy to create and maintain the menu structure.  Since www.dmbruss.com is a treed structure when you navigate into sections like "Red Rover" or "Full-Timing Life Style" and around those sections.  We made use of the multiple level menu structure capability of Deluxe Menus and the initial set of menu buttons on the home page virtually has access to every page in the web site.  We then used that set of buttons as source for the set of buttons for the levels below by just deleting buttons.

While we lost the automatic creation function of FrontPage, we gained more control of the navigation structure.  We can now easily have multiple page links and now have a menu structure more than one level with only parents and children links that FrontPage allowed.

Enhanced Popup Windows

To improve our viewers experience, we found an enhancement to creating popup windows such that the popups can also act as a slideshow.  This software, Visual Lightbox, comes from the same company that we get Deluxe Menu and Deluxe Popup Window from.

Visual Lightbox works best for photo galleries with limited text needs. When we want to have more text, we use Visual SlideShow.

Photo Galleries

Most of the pictures we have in www.dmbruss.com have text with them so we put them in tables to manage the text in relationship with the photos.  But we had a few spreads of photos where the text was not as critical and there was a lot of photos.

We searched for software with the following criteria:  to maintain the thumbnail to full photo relationship we have maintained throughout the web site.  Virtually every photo in the web site can be clicked on and a larger image will appear.  We wanted this capability so that when someone wants to see the detail of a photo, it is available.  We choose 800x600 as the large size because that fits into most browser windows.

We are using Visual SlideShow from the same folks that we get Deluxe Menu and Popup Window from.

There is an automatic slideshow capability in Visual Slideshow so that the viewer can choose to view the photos in a slideshow or one at a time.

Photo Editing

Photoshop Elements We used Microsoft Digital Image Pro 10.0 for manipulating photos.  We have more capability than we can use in Digital Image Pro but the batch editing features make it a lot easier to import the numerous photos we take from the camera and wind up with images for the web site.  Microsoft has discontinued this product but we will use it until it no longer runs.

The use of Microsoft Digital Image Pro 10.0 came to an end with a major upgrade to Windows 10 that eliminated the IE version that it used.

We are now using Adobe Photoshop Elements. Not quite as easy as Digital Image Pro but very powerful.
Disclaimer: The information in this site is a collection of data we derived from the vendors and from our personal experiences.  This information is meant as a learning guide for you to  make your own decisions  Best practices and code should always be followed.  The recommendations we make are from our personal experiences and we do not receive any compensation for those recommendations.
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