Indiana County PC Users Group   http://www.icpcug.com	Meetings 3rd Tuesday of each month   7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. at the Indiana County Technology Center Hamill Rd., Indiana, PA Everyone Welcome
Tuesday, August 16, 2005 Member chauncey Ross convened the monthly meeting of the Indiana PC Users Group at 7:12 pm at the Indiana County Technology Center, Hamill Road, Indiana, PA. Minutes, Treasurer's Report The minutes were presented and approved with a revision to the closing paragraph.  A treasury report was not presented. Program Jane Erdman conducted a presentation on webpage design. She started building websites in 1997 by writing the raw html code.  The look of websites have changed dramatically since then.  She now sees a program called Dreamweaver.  More people can create websites using this program along with FrontPage but the code isn't clean.  MS Publisher is terrible at converting information into html code.  If the code is too long search engines won't pick up the site. Jane passed out a handout that she used as a talking guide. Do I need a website? Local bus9ness can advertise 24-7 with yellow pages.  They should include their website within the add.  At fraction of the cost of yellow pages they can include images, change the site quickly and customers can get information with no long distance charges.  Google places most popular sites on top.  Yahoo is more frustrating to work with. How do I build a website? Most time is spent with the design.  Use a photo editor like Photoshop to create images.  Working in layers gives flexibility for changing at a later date.  Can save with set layers.  Save pictures as jpeg as small as possible without degrading image quality (<100k).  Use common fonts for text otherwise save text as an image. Dreamweaver creates clean code.  Using Dreamweaver one can create mouseover buttons and layers for images and text position control.  Dreamweaver has a nice status bar that shows information on picture, text or whatever is selected (FrontPage does not have this feature).  She creates the homepage to look different than the rest of the site.  Can create a template in Dreamweaver to save time in setting header, background or borders but won't set navigation.

XML requires cleaner code - latest version of Dreamweaver will check for compliance to XML standards.  The advantage of XML is that a webpage will display on Netscape, Internet Explorer or Firefox the same way.

Flash is a math based code which will resize a page to fit any fixed screen.  Pepsi or Code is flash-based.  Photo albums can be done with flast.  $15 for Webgallery.

Currently it costs less than $15/2 years for a domain name.  Pencom is a good server.  MevaCart is a secure site at $50/month which includes shopping cart.  You can buy a program to create your own shopping cart for around $700.  See www.networksolutions.com for a list of websites and information.

Jane will consult with a client.  The initial consultation being free.  www.webbtek.net.

Old Business, new business
No items of old or new business were presented for discussion.

Close
The next meeting is scheduled for 7 pm on Tuesday, September 20, 2005.  With no other business to conduce, Chauncey Ross adjourned the meeting at 9:06 pm.

Respectfully submitted,


Robert Dalecki, Secretary