website development

Online Form Resources

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Recently I've been tasked with coming up with better options for more
functional online forms - on a budget. Improved forms should be:

  • Easy to setup
  • Easy to change
  • Easy to maintain
  • Be able to generate: Excel, CSV (comma separated values) data files
    of selected information

So, with that criteria in mind, I set out, first, via code - commonly:

Project: Web (part one)

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Back in January, the folks at the Community Software Lab were asked by a university-based non-profit if we could translate an artist's Photoshop mock-up into HTML and CSS. Eager to please (and needing some money to keep the budget balanced), we said "sure" and submitted our estimate for 20 hours of work. It's March, and we're still working. What's the deal?

For my part, I gratefully ignored things until the last week of February, content to let Dan, my boss, manage the project. He had subcontracted the work to Erich, our soon-to-be VISTA, and for the most part, let things be, receiving changes from Erich every few days. It worked great--as long as changes didn't need to be made immediately. Erich put together some pretty good code and certainly earned his 20 hours' paycheck. Then things began to pick up.

Reworking old websites

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I am currently reworking an old website for HPP, Helping-SF.  This website is meant for low-income families and case managers.  In it's current form, the website is very disorganized both in terms of content and also in terms of pages and locations.  There are numerous broken links, orphaned pages and older versions housed within numerous local locations.  Although I have some experience with dreamweaver, I have never moved an existing site to a new location.  I am not sure if it would be better to work with the existing local files and reorganize that way or whether I should migrate the site to a local folder and start fresh.  Any suggestions? 


Comment from Aliya Abbasi on November 3, 2006 - 6:03pm

i would suggest, you start with an analysis of the current site and make lists of it's plus points and minus points. then talk with others in the organization and make lists of must-haves, like-to-haves.

site migration should be easy enough - it is usually just copying the files to the new location. i would strongly recommend that you divide the project into parts so it is easier to handle and don't forget to save a copy of all the old files (just in case to a cd). i've waded thru a couple of site migrations and i'd be happy to help; let me know via email or phone.

Good-Luck!