Design Guidelines and Authoring Tools for slodocents.org

Our current format and design guidelines reflect the ultimate in simplicity and usability.  All fonts are black Arial on white backgrounds.  Except for our logo, no icons or  graphics are used unless they have an explicit functional purpose such as hiding an e-mail address from spam robots.  There are no complicated navigational schemes - to the extent that information needs to become compartmentalized, links to such material currently simply open up a new window that can be closed when the viewer is done, and the originating home page remains in view.  Basically, anyone who can edit a simple Microsoft Word document should be able to be trained to edit independent portions of this website in a matter of minutes or hours.  Materials deemed to be sensitive or not appropriate for public viewing will be published, for now, in one (soon to be) password-protected area at http://slodocents.org/password-protected.  If you think you should have access to this private section, send an e-mail to webmaster at slodocents.org stating your name, contact information, and what you are trying to do.  For ease-of-use, safety in publication (i.e., it should be almost impossible to overwrite other sections of this site, as can happen when using FTP tools) and managing turnover of volunteer docents, this site is edited entirely in the most popular and simple-to-use Microsoft product FrontPage 2003 (requires Windows), with a few "sub-webs" utilized to facilitate unique user-permissions for different areas of interest managed by a few different editors.  This site is intended to be edited "live" with multiple backup copies made to the hard drives of editors' PCs before changes are entered.  We are discussing if we want to allow some editors to optionally use Microsoft Expression Web to edit portions of slodocents.org, as Expression Web is now (2007) the official replacement product for FrontPage 2003.  Millions of web sites, however, are now maintained, and will continue to be maintained for many years, using the ultra-simple FrontPage 2003 product.  All pages will refer to one simple "style sheet" called normal.css (which will make all fonts display in Arial, and which standardizes a few header and normal text sizes).

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