Hi gang!

You may have noticed that the front page for DCSki (www.dcski.com) has undergone a major facelift. This new style is not yet incorporated throughout the site, just on the home page.

I'm looking for feedback on the new home page. How do you like it? What don't you like about it? What could be improved? Either send me comments (scott@dcski.com) or simply post your feedback to this forum.

Also, I must apologize for the lack of news articles over the past couple weeks. I've been spending a lot of time on DCSki, but most of this has been "behind the scenes." More articles should be on the way soon.

Thanks!

- Scott

Hi Scott,

I like the new format, but I had to enlarge my viewing area to see it all. It is a bit larger in screen size that the old DCski page. Seems easy enough to navigate and links to everything I look for in the site are in plain view on the page.

Keep up the good work!!!

Yes, the width of the page is a bit larger than in the past. I debated about this. I had originally designed DCSki to fit reasonably well on a 13" monitor at 640x480 pixels. That was three years ago, and I decided that most users these days are running with at least 15" monitors and 1,024x768 resolution.

But there might still be users running at 800x600, so I might reduce the width a bit so the page fits perfectly with that resolution. (Right now it's a little too large.)

Thanks for the feedback!

- Scott

I have same comment as Gill on viewing area. Also, I find it personally eye catching to see, front and center, a photo of a skier or a snow related scene. It seemed to me that a photo of some of that white stuff was what usually first hit me in the old front page. Right now it is all text with some small photos in a banner ad at the top.

Hi folks,

Ok, I made two changes: I reduced the width of the front page so it should fit (barely) on an 800x600 screen. Please let me know how this looks. (It's hard to test on every browser/platform, so if anyone sees anything that looks out of order, please let me know.)

I also added a photo on the home page. I planned on having a "top story" with photo on the "Top Stories" page but didn't have any good photos or stories at the time. (I still don't, but I decided to put up a picture of wildflowers I took in Wyoming a couple years ago in the interim..)

Thanks,

- Scott

The page fits on my 15" monitor and the wildflowers caught my eye.

I think the new page looks good, keep up the good work.

on 5/4/00 the photo of wildflowers, dcski logo and a few other things are superimposed on top of some of the front page text. is this the fault of my pc or did you further tinker with front page? this normally hasn't been a problem with the new front page.

Hi Jim,

Nothing has changed on the front page (that I'm aware of - I know I've been delinquent in providing updates but I've been so busy with other things lately), but I have seen the behavior you refer to. What's probably happening is that the weather graphic (top right of page) is slow to load. That graphic is generated in quasi-real-time, although there is some caching. If you visit the page and there isn't a recent copy in the server's cache, a new image is generated - after polling data from the National Weather Service and various other sources. If something hangs in this process, that image might not make it to the screen along with the rest of the components, and as a result, the page layout might appear corrupted until the missing image is provided. Usually the page seems to correct itself after a few seconds once the image "catches up." If the NWS server is down or there's some other problem, I suppose the image might not make it.

Please let me know if you're still seeing the problem or if it was just that once. (Also let me know what browser/platform you're using if you continue to see it.)

Thanks,

- Scott