With my personal lace pages I'd like to reach the world. Therefore I wrote a
version for the three languages I happen to master more or less.
The French version is available as far as I got help of a volunteer.
With most other pages I mainly aim at members of the LOKK,
so these are only in Dutch.
This page is only in English because I assume that most webmasters can read it more or less.
The favourites/bookmarks that I maintain with my browser are the basis for my link pages. A self-written Perl-script generates the pages. There are various services on the web that check for broken links on a single page, so the scripts also collects all the foreign links for that purpose.
I mainly test my pages with MS Internet Explorer 5.5, sometimes with Netscape Navigator 4.6 or without CSS. Less than 2% of my visitors use older or other browsers. The html-syntax of my pages I usually check with www.doctor-html.com, to check support by the most popular browsers.
I learned to avoid funny tricks and scripts,
they tend to make your site less accessible or annoy the visitors.
Even text floating around images can make pages hard to print or create overlap.
Frames were easy to avoid with a Perl pre-processor.
Only for the generator of technical drawings for Flanders grounds
does require JavaScript.
In that case an alternative is offered for pencil and paper.
Its an alternative for visitors without JavaScript
and can even be passed on to lace makers without Internet.
Basically I use a plain text editor (like notepad) to create my pages.
A commercial generator might look nice and easy to start with,
but they tend to generate inefficient and non-portable pages,
moreover on the long run they restrain your possibilities.
I started learning HTML with cutting and pasting parts of pages I liked that looked useful.
Further knowledge I gained mainly from www.htmlhelp.com.
Even Cascading Style Sheets appeared not too complex to be useful.
As I had to learn Perl for other reasons too,
I used it to develop pre-processors to insert things like
image widths and heights, standard metatags, navigation links
and the appropriate texts of the correct language.
Perl appeared to be indeed a practical language, that's where the P an L stand for.
For single-language pages I write valid HTML-files
and let a pre-processor script convert them to HTML files with common details filled in.
A suffix .htm for the original version and .html for the enhanced version,
allows to test small changes with the original htm versions,
and run the pre-processor just now and then to test the overall result.
You don't need to invent the wheel like I did
just search for "html pre-processors" with your favourite search engine.
For me my website serves as a big exercise.
For multi-language pages the generating scripts are mainly huge print statements producing HTML-code. Around these print statements a loop controls which language is generated.
This site started as a collection of personal bobbin lace pages.
But later on I added a home page for a local lace guild
(Het Groene Hart)
and wrote a few pages to support an article I wrote for the
Kantbrief
(a magazine of the national lace guild, LOKK).
These subjects didn't fit nicely together
so I split my single site into several sites
and created a new welcome-page on top.
Sorry for those who linked to other pages than the original welcome page.
I gave my personal lace pages a face-lift because I wanted to abandon the Icons as navigation tools. Too much work to maintain and not always clear, as proven by an American who couldn't find the English version, she looked for the US flag and overlooked the UK flag. This time I kept the page address as much as possible unchanged, though I split up a few pages as I was no longer restricted by the navigation icons.
Somebody criticized the illogical connection between the home page and the main site (my personal lace pages). At that occasion I also moved the navigation bars on top to a column in the margin.
As the site grew, I struggled too much with single word descriptions of the individual pages. With more words the margin would get too wide for small monitors. So I was happy to discover a script offered by my provider, which allowed me to use a drop-down list that would also work for visitors without JavaScript. It may look less attractive, but keeps it simple to maintain, while still offering a consistent navigation method.