Development Information

Standards of Design

The standard of design on the Alternative Breaks website includes using the color purple, white text and the official Alternative Spring Break or Alternative Breaks logos. A template was developed that included the navigation menu on the left side of the page, two picture sidebars on each side of the page and a graphical banner at the top of the page. The banner is offset from the other elements of the page by a horizontal rule. Text pertinent to the topic of each page was then inserted into the middle area. This template design helped keep the AB site professional and consistent.

Structure

The directory structure of the AB website is a single sub-folder within the public.html directory on my personal student server space. All elements of the AB site are within this subfolder, titled “AB,” and is a container for graphics (of all types) and .htm files. The AB folder is organized by file type for easy access to any file in the folder. Naming conventions include space, hyphen, and underscore-free file names. Graphics are named according to what they represent, followed by a file extension of .gif, .png, .bmp, .jpg, and .jpeg. Web pages are simply named according to their topic, such as “trips” with a file extension of .htm. All filenames are in lowercase type.

The Future of the Alternative Breaks Website

The Alternative Breaks website will remain on my public server space until my server space is deleted upon graduation. To ensure the continued use of this resource, the AB site will be transferred to permanent public server space granted to AB by Grand Valley. Alternative Breaks already uses the website (and the AB brochure) for promotion and practical uses.