Green Bar Redesign

You're probably wondering what happened to all the neat graphics and visual effects that used to slowly greet a visitor to this site. Well, in a word, they're gone. Yeah, they looked pretty neat, and they were what most people came to expect when visiting a web site. You've come to expect a lot of flashy graphics and such. But all of those extras really got in the way of the real purpose of this site. The Green Bar Web Site isn't here to wow you with visual effects. It's here to provide a little information, and perhaps a little inspiration in your Scouting efforts.

One reason the design was changed was the fact that I'm running out of space on the server. Now, I could have used my resources and found another place to host this web site, but I didn't. The reason I didn't actually brings us to the second reason I felt the need to redesign the site, and the reason for the current design. First, though, let me wow you with some statistics:

How Much Does A Document Weigh?

In case you're wondering, a web page's document weight is the total size of all of the elements involved in displaying the page. The document weight is used to determine bandwidth requirements, download times, and all manner of other web site statistics that are generally only interesting to people like me. Web designers and ISPs look at document weights and hit counts in addition to the number of visitors to determine the resources that a web site needs so it won't crash or overload the server. Hits, by the way, are not the number of people who visit a particular page. Hits are actually the number of times a browser needs to access the server in order to display the page. For the record, the numbers for the old design are actually pretty high for a site like this one.

So, with the old design, it took 30 trips to the server just for your browser to get all of the elements of the page so you could read it. For simplicity's sake, I only calculated the document weight of the site's main page. Unfortunately, the numbers get higher the further you go into the site.

Like I said, most of that stuff isn't very interesting to you, and most likely it doesn't mean anything to you, so how about some numbers that will mean something to you? Take a look at this:

If you haven't guessed, the download time of a web page is the average estimated number of seconds a visitor (that's you) has to wait for all of the elements of the page to appear. To make use of this information, you need to know two things: 1) the download times for the old design are considered horrendously slow!; 2) the above numbers represent download times assuming near-perfect conditions. That means your phone line is clear of interference, there aren't any bottlenecks in the route your browser takes to get to my site, the server is not bogged down with a lot of traffic, and all sorts of other techie stuff.

Too Much Behind The Scenes

What's more, the neat visual effects on the old page used an external JavaScript, which means your browser needed to request the external script, interpret it, request all of the necessary resources from the server, and then execute the code. Since the same script is used on every page, the script loads into memory every menu graphic, even if it's not used. The index page actually only uses 27 of the 55 image files

What all of that boils down to is that the page wasn't very nice to the user. In fact, not only was it way too heavy with graphics for a site devoted mostly to text, but the spectacularly brilliant looking navigation system (those cool mouseover links) wasn't very user friendly. One quick look at the site map and you can see why it was important to have a site map. All those documents were linked to from one place or another, but it wasn't that easy getting there except through the site map. Of course, once you got where you were going, chances were pretty good you'd have to take a step back in order to take a step forward.

So, to make a long story short (too late!), I've redesigned the site to make life easier for you to use. If you want, you can get a pretty full explanation of the new design by following any of the links to the new features. These page will give you a real good description of the features you can see, and even a few features you can't see, as well as a whole lot more stuff about web site design. More»