Website information

We've redesigned the Pajarito Mountain website with a number of objectives in mind:

  1. Widen the site to take advantage of ever-increasing monitor size. Almost everyone is using 1024 px width or larger.
  2. Improve the amount of information readily available to visitors on the home page, without having to go digging, by better organization of space and structure. The old site did a poor job of communicating clearly what we have up here at the mountain, and there is still a remarkable level of misunderstanding in New Mexico about Pajarito Mountain Ski Area.
  3. Make the site visually more attractive: less cluttered, more photos, cleaner layout etc..
  4. Bring the coding up to date: the last redesign was over 5 years ago, and XHTML with dynamic content is becoming the standard. The new site is fully XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant (except for one page), and uses CSS throughout to control appearance.

Please feel free to send feedback on the site, and also report any problems you find. Also, if you want to share any of your Pajarito photos for possible inclusion then let me know. More pages will undoubtedly be added in response to suggestions or inspiration.

The site has been tested with all the major browsers: Firefox, Safari, Opera, Flock, Omniweb, Camino, and (unavoidably) Internet Explorer 6 & 7. Surely no one chooses to use IE after trying virtually anything else, but it's still hanging on to the majority of users. Older browsers are likely to have problems, so I recommend you get a new one. They are mostly free.

Technical comments

For anyone who cares about this kind of thing — the site is fixed width and fixed font size (pixels) to give the necessary control over text block placement, and while that is regarded by some as web-unfriendly, there is really no other way to format this kind of page design effectively, since images don't resize. If you forcibly override the text size it will spoil the appearance.

The navigation menus are driven by javascript (using Adobe's Spry framework), so if your browser doesn't support javascript it or you have it disabled then they won't work. I don't think there are any good reasons to disable javascript these days, so it shouldn't have to be an issue. The homepage calendar is a Flash element which requires a Flash plugin to display. Again, everyone should have access to Flash by now, but it degrades OK to an empty box if not. The full calendar is an embedded Google calendar. It just works.

The pages are constructed dynamically by PHP with MySQL and server side includes. The site has been moved from our old Earthlink Business platform to a more modern server, and should load noticeable faster.

Anyway, that's enough boring stuff. Let's go and have some fun....

 

Peter Dickson, May 2008.

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