A few visitors asked how we designed Bluejeans' Place.  Without boring you to death, here's a quick synopsis:

Technical Approach

• Web Authoring Software:  WebSite Complete from Go Daddy Software (see link at foot of page for more info). 
  • WebSite Complete puts the heavy HTML coding and related tasks in the background by presenting a word-processor sort of interface to the site developer.  This requires some trade-offs on fancy HTML tricks and things like that, but since those tricks come with a lot of overhead processing at both the hosting server and your remote client, it seems like a good trade-off. 
  • This is in much the same thinking as my employer, an Internet company, where we have underlying applications, but use SSL stylesheets to configure the pages to the desired appearance.
  • WebSite Complete also allows seamless uploading via FTP to your hosting service, whether it is Go Daddy's hosting service which we use or some other company's service.
• Photos:  All the photos on the site since January 2001 were taken with a 35 mm Minolta 7000 SLR with a variety of lenses such as 28:70 and 70:300. 
  • Normally, I used Kodak's ASA 400 film, although sometimes I'll use ASA 800 or 1600 film. 
  • No, I don't use Fuji film anymore since I learned through bitter experience that their film is grainier than Kodak's film.
• Photographic Developing and Processing:  Most of the photos taken since January 2001 were developed through Kodak and produced on their CD-ROM.
  • The Kodak CD-ROM has some interesting and helpful software to "clean up after mistakes" such as poor lighting, cropping, red eyes on people, etc.
  • Since the photos are placed directly on the CD-ROM by Kodak, that eliminates the scanning step and keeps the pictures at the first generation level; not the second generation level you get when you scan a photograph.  This keeps the picture's post-development focus appearance as sharp as possible.
    • We stopped using the Fuji CD-ROM and photo disks as the quality was nowhere near the high level of the Kodak CD-ROM. 
    • Additionally, the Fuji photo processing software on their CD-ROM is amateurish compared to Kodak's capabilities.  (Yes, I felt burned by Fuji's poor quality in film, processing and CD-ROM software on my KoKo Taylor photographs!). 
    • The Fuji photo disk is of such poor quality I would go without and scan photos myself before wasting money on their photo disk again.
• Advanced Image Processing:  Some of the photos, due to skewing, cropping needs or other requirements are further processed using LView Pro 2.85, an imaging processing software application from MMedia Research Corp (www.lview.com). 
  • LView allows you to change a lot of photos quickly from one format to another.
  • LView also helps with "covering up some sins" when photos need some additional processing to adapt them for web site viewing.
• Hosting Service:  We use Go Daddy's hosting service where they handle everything for us once we upload the site to them.  For $9.95 per month for 50 MB of web server space, 1500 MB of bandwidth and system administration and security, why would anyone bother with their own web server and all those headaches of connectivity, security, administration, hardware, software, patching the server, etc?  Not us!
• Link Checking:  We use a link checker called Xenu, produced by Tilman Hausherr, to check both internal and external links on Bluejeans' Place.  You can download a copy of this freeware at http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html.
• Connectivity Checking:  We use both on-line and freeware tools from SamSpade.org to check our site's connectivity and related issues.

Site Design Philosophy 

Our site design philosophy is to provide rich and informative content with photographs or documents which meet the needs of blues music fans, railfans, road trip or history buffs and project managers 

• This requires, at times, a trade-off between long pages and multiple pages. 
• In some cases, where a long page with multiple photographs is needed to provide content within a certain context, a note is placed at the top of the page asking the end user to allow the page to load due to the pictures. 
• In other cases, we will crop extraneous parts of the photograph or resize the photograph to speed page loading. 
• Except where the size limitation would destroy the photographic content or context, photos on the site do not exceed 399 pixels in horizontal or vertical sizing.
• In over two years of operation and thousands of visitors who have viewed tens of thousands of page views, we have not had a single comment that our pages took too long to load.
  • The average user on our site spends only 82 seconds on a page, so obviously the pages are loading pretty quickly!
  • The average user visits only one page, but the remainder navigate around to quite a few pages in the site on the average visit.

Search Engine Optimization and Free Submission