Colophon
A major redesign of the New London Main Street web site was completed in November 2005, but we continue to work toward providing an entirely new level of service to NLMS members, volunteers, and visitors. Please see the report prepared for the 2006 annual meeting (PDF, 143 KB) for a snapshot of web site usage over the past fiscal year.
The New London Main Street web site is the responsibility of the Organization Committee, and its web design subcommittee spent many hours planning a new site that would better serve a large and growing body of information to the public, as well as choosing a logo, colors, photos, and other elements.
Based on the parameters and graphics provided, Bizgrok Web Design & Hosting created a new design from scratch, utilizing the latest standard Internet technologies. The new design not only ensures future flexibility, but also paves the way for new features that will enable NLMS to better serve both its members and the public at large.
Web Site Features
Contact Form
The new Contact page can be used to email NLMS staff and board members, without exposing their email address to spammers.
Volunteer Hours Reporting
Volunteers can report the hours they've donated to our projects via an online form, which collates this information so that aggregate information can be reported to our sponsors.
Events Listing
The Directory and Events listings are generated from a simple database. This approach makes the web site easier to maintain, and will also allow us to create new features that better deliver information to the site's visitors.
Those who use calendaring software that supports the iCalendar standard can subscribe to the Events listing via http://newlondonmainstreet.org/events/icalendar.php and receive updated information on new events automatically.
A simple RSS 2.0 version of the Events listing is also available via http://newlondonmainstreet.org/events/rss20.php for use with most popular software. The feed is enhanced with elements that facilitate inclusion of the events in Google Base.
Search
The contents of the site are regularly submitted to the major search engines through the Google Sitemaps protocol and other semi-automated methods. Visitors can then search the New London Main Street web site using Google or other search engines.
Miscellaneous Features
Finally, to aid the technically-inclined user who wishes to apply their own style sheets to the site, the body of each page is marked with an ID of "new-london-main-street".
Additional features are planned, so stay tuned!
Technical Information
Bizgrok's design utilizes standard XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language, an XML-based successor to HTML) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to separate presentation from content and ensure future flexibility. This approach, as well as the use of access keys and other features, also contributes to accessibility.
The web site will perform best in a web browser, such as Mozilla Firefox or Opera, that fully supports these and other Internet standards. It has been tested, however, against all major browsers, with the goal that it function and look substantially the same in the latest versions of all actively-developed browsers. To that end, many modifications have been made to accomodate users of Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Web site pages (and other files) are generated using the open source PHP (PHP Hypertext Processor) scripting language. Other open source software used to create, generate, and/or host the NLMS web site on Bizgrok's servers includes the Linux and FreeBSD operating systems; the Apache web server; the GNU Image Manipulation Program (for editing photos & graphics); the OpenOffice.org office suite (for generating PDF files); and, of course, the venerable vi text editor.
Each page on the site includes rich metadata, including a PICS label and elements from the Dublin Core, for optimal categorization of its content.
