A c t i o n f o r L i b r a r i e s — N o v e m b e r 2 0 0 0

The Internet Connection

By Michael Sauers

BCR's New Web Site: Behind the Scenes
With the debut of BCR Online in October, people have asked just what it took to redesign a Web site containing more than 1,500 pages. Here is an overview.

We began the redesign last March following a suggestion that BCR consider bringing the Web site up to speed with more recent design practices. BCR's Internet committee, an eight-member group with representatives from every BCR department, assembled several times to discuss what we wanted. We agreed that the two-column design should stay, then proposed several designs and finally agreed on what you see now on BCR's Web site (www.bcr.org).

We also decided to take the opportunity to address inconsistencies in our old site in both page design and HTML coding. We opted to standardize the design using cascading style sheets (CSS) — a file that defines the style and format of all associated Web pages — and use the same HTML software package, HTML-Kit from the W3C, instead of the variety of software packages we had used in the past.

At that point we were confronted with a technology issue. Was CSS supported by enough Web browsers to be a legitimate technology for our site? We looked at our server logs and found that enough visitors to our site were using 4.x browsers that offered support for CSS (although in some cases limited). At that time Mozilla (now Netscape 6) was on the horizon. We determined that with its release and its better support of CSS, more than enough people would upgrade their browsers and support the CSS technology.

A week later (and much more knowledgeable in CSS and its varying support in different browsers), we created two CSS files for BCR's two different page styles: major (with a green menu down the left side of the page) and minor (no menu). A new header was produced for all pages. Realizing that in the future we might want to change the header without having to modify 1,500 pages, we decided to use server-side includes (SSI), which allows the server to insert elements not included in the original HTML document. With SSI, we can change one file and instantly update the header on every page in the site.

In June we trained all of our Web site authors (the Internet Committee members plus four additional BCR staff members) on how to convert the Web pages from the old version to the new. Knowing this would be a long and tedious process, we created a copy of the existing site onto a backup server where we could work without others being able to see the project until it was done. Few of BCR's authors were familiar with either CSS or SSI, so that was added to the training session. To be honest, the training didn't go well. Not enough of the bugs had been worked out of the conversion process. But everyone did get the necessary exposure to the newer technologies.

From there we wrote BCR's Web Style Manual. This provides the conversion process and all necessary information to create documents in the new format. Its pages include instructions on editorial content, overall design, proper graphics use, HTML and CSS coding guidelines, page templates and annotated CSS files.

The style manual has been (and will continue to be) a living document. At first it was quite short. However, as the conversion process got under way, problems popped up that we had not foreseen. As a problem was solved, the solution was written into the style manual.

BCR's server administrators became an indispensable part of the project by creating a perl script that could be run against the old files. The script stripped out most of the HTML code (alignments, fonts, colors, etc.) that we wanted to replace with CSS and added much of the new code for the new design (SSI, CSS links, meta data, etc.).

The final two weeks before the switch over were the most strenuous. With the deadline looming, everyone focused on converting the remaining pages, checking links and spotting annoying little problems that seemed to appear from nowhere.

On Friday, October 6, all of the files from the backup server were copied to the main server, overwriting all of the old files. Although the process made all of us nervous, it turned out to be the easiest part of the project and went off without a hitch.

For more information on how BCR Online is constructed, the site's style manual is available at www.bcr.org/stylemanual/.

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