Main Points

Site Map

How do you like our bread crumb navigation? What? Haven't noticed it? Join the club. This is one of those things that's very simple to do but that can hit an unpleasant snag. Bread crumb navigation is exceptionally handy because not only does it give you a way to navigate around the site via links, but it identifies where you are. So even if the user never clicks the control, it still helps to orient visitors to the site and the page that they are on. Two user interface hits for the price of one.

Now we already have a site map up and working. So it's not a question of knowing how to do it. In fact in development, the site map for this Beta site is up and running. The problem is that there are several sites that have to work together. In ASP.NET, it's quite easy to run multiple site maps for different sites. You just have to configure the web.config file for the root directory. No problem, we tracked down the correct syntax, added the code to our web.config, and tried a couple demos on our home boxes using Visual Web Developer (VWD) Express and IIS. No problems. The next step, clearly, was to upload everything to the live server. Problems.

So we checked with our web host. The answer came back... oh, yeah that should work. Hmmmmmm... We'll get back to you. So at some point in the hopefully near future, we'll be able to assist you with a bread crumb navigation bar. Stay tuned.

[chroniclemaster1, 2007/07/08]
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Contact Form

This is our first major ASP.NET implementation. And it's being delayed by the artistic people. ;) We already have all the code put together. It's even up and running, driving the contact form for a different site. And although the email message our webform generates will read a little differently, that's a comparatively minor problem. Communicating and sending the email message with the server is all worked out. So why isn't there a contact form somewhere on this page?

The creative department is still hammering out the webform. All the sophisticated ASP.NET 2.0 technology is in place and begging to be put in. But the XHTML and CSS, along with all the design decisions that go into creating the form on the webpage haven't been hammered out yet. More on that below.

Once we get this up and running, we also need to increase the security a little bit. Well, we probably don't NEED to, but it's good best practices in any case. Besides, in most web applications, security is a much more important issue than it is for us, and this IS Earth Chronicle. If anyone should know, we should.

[chroniclemaster1, 2007/07/08]
  1. The location of the contact form is one major issue. There's an awful lot of stuff right up at the top of the page. We'd like it to have high visibility, but once the bread crumb navigation is up and running, that's going to be a lot of controls on very little real estate. There seems like there should be at least SOME content when you first open the page. Something that the visitor can start reading. Right now, we'd be pushing it if we added a contact form as a bar across the top. We might be able to do it at the bottom though this is a little more out of the way. Another option is to locate it immediately below the Main Points box. We're still playing around with it.
    [chroniclemaster1, 2007/07/08]
  2. Still nothing settled on location. But we are going to want some kind of image to go with the contact form. The contact form is a key part of the site's interactivity, so the feeling is that the form itself should be interactive. To what extent is still under debate. Should there be a rollover image? Should the images swap on click? Should interacting with the image trigger the pretty version, or should the feedback links be the only thing to trigger it. However, there is one thing that is finally settled after a couple weeks of intermittent designing (you know along with all the revising and posting website, little things like that). Here are the images, and just to demo, check it out as a rollover image. The alt text, obviously, states simply "Contact Us!"
    [chroniclemaster1, 2007/07/08]

    Contact Us!
  3. Here's our first go at the XHTML structure for the contact bar. I want to fit it underneath the navbar. There's too much contradictory CSS however, it is not well behaved trying to make things line up aesthetically.
  4. ContactFormTest01IncompatibleUnits.aspx - This is the first webform that we put together. We were trying to incorporate them into the site wide navbar. As you can see the navbar overlaps the contact bar, especially in IE, and the page links hide behind the page info section. A lot of styling left to do.
    [chroniclemaster1, 2007/07/22]
  5. ContactFormTest02BottomOverlaps.aspx - This was the closest approach that we achieved to build the contact form below the site wide navbar. Maybe we'll have to come back to this, but hopefully not.
    [chroniclemaster1, 2007/07/22]
  6. ContactFormTest03SemanticXHTML.aspx - Version three let us work out most of the form elements in the navbar, so we spit and polished the XHTML in this version until it was semantically shiny. Looks like I kept right on working and developing, huh? You'd never know that my monitor blew out last night would you? Well, except for me telling you, of course. Pretty cool. We had sparks flying (like the 4th of July!), that extra crispy burnt elecentronics smell, and everything. So this version of the contact form, we dedicate to craigslist and the used $20 monitor that we are now using. :) Thanks!
    [chroniclemaster1, 2007/07/23]
  7. ContactFormTest04Footer.aspx - Version four finally got a nice looking, accessible, browser compatible version up and running. Now we just have to get it up on the website and test it for real with VB code behind.
    [chroniclemaster1, 2007/07/31]
  8. ContactFormTest05EmailTuning.aspx - Setting up the email message. Here is your first look at the VB code behind that controls the functionality of the contact form after the button is clicked.
    [chroniclemaster1, 2007/08/07]
  9. ContactFormTest06CSharp.aspx - Setting up the email message in C#. Here is the code behind rewritten in today's latest .NET language to control the functionality of the contact form.
    10. [chroniclemaster1, 2007/08/20]
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