Illinois Valley Oregon Design update April 3, 2007

Illinois Valley Oregon Design update April 3, 2007

Some changes have been made to the basic home site and navigation. Nice bright yellow boxes with links are listed on the inside.

This navigation setup is duplicated top and bottom for your convenience.

A handy Nav bar is available as well.

I designed a really interesting navigation system that look similar to a pad display that you might see some television Sci Fi shows which would show you the current page and the options of what surrounding pages have if you clicked in the different arrow directions. However this may be a bit too fancy / odd for a community based website. So I will use that for another project. :)

I hope you like the "cleaner" look on the page design

Discussion Board Time Out has been extended.

Discussion Board Time Out has been extended from 60 minutes to 4 hours

http://www.illinoisvalleyoregon.com/ivbb1/

GeorgeSR on the discussion board reported to me that he had tried a couple times to post to the discussion board some long posts about the area. Unfortunately when he clicked the "send" button, his post went to oblivion!

I am sorry that I missed out on those updates George! I bet they were good ones!

I looked into the matter and discovered that I had accepted the default setting of a timeout value on the Bulletin board of 3600 Seconds. That works out to an Hour of time at which point the bulletin board if it has not seen an update from the person will log you off. This is a very common feature for many web hosted applications. Some are kind enough to report you timed out with friendly message on your browser AFTER you hit the submit button. Others just simply say nothing. The original intent is to ration server resources to active sessions. Well until the board gets REALLY busy... I updated the server timeout feature to 14400 seconds.

So now you can type for almost 4 hours before the session will timeout! I suspect you were cut off just past the hour mark on some of your long posts! So hopefully this fix it!

So my apologies George! I certainly want to see long posts ! I have experienced this same problem on other discussion boards as user, but so I am so glad I could fix it here!

So post again George! I look forward to your latest info!

Regards,
Dexter

Illinois Valley Oregon Updates Status March 1, 2007

Illinois Valley Oregon Updates Status March 1, 2007

IllinoisValleyOregon.com has had quite a bit of work in the background. So far you really haven't seen many changes as of late. Part of this is due to trying to find the right website look, tools, and features that people may want in the area. This has been all been part of a bigger picture of what websites are changing into in general. Those of you you who are tracking such things have seen quite a bit shift from website design over the past couple of years. So much of it seems to be a fight of the "cuteness" factor versus functionality.

Part of the charm of web design is its sheer flexibility. This means that you can be so flexible that no one understands it. Make it too simple and it is boring. One of my favorite complaints is making a website so complicated that you get lost. Even the feature of what are called "bread crumbs" seems to be a crutch to some bad website designs.

Frankly I want to make an easy and inviting website, featuring dynamic content and all that. Part of the issue is having something to say.

So I am working on a face lift to make it even easier to use and expose some other parts that have been in the works. Another pet peeve is having websites in which you wander empty "rooms" where there is no content!

So Yes. I am working on designs that contain "empty rooms" Well shortly I will show them. Hopefully I will make it easier for people interested in the area to fill them! :)