I’ve created and maintained a website for a nonprofit group for about seven years now. I’ve done it in my spare time, and of course there were periods of time when I was largely absent from it (always available in emergencies of course, but I like to think I constructed this well enough that that wasn’t much of an issue, ha).

I’ve been back at it and working on it fairly steadily since about February, a few hours a week, more or less. I fixed a number of things “under the hood” (there’s an extensive volunteers only section that lets the volunteers manage information on the dogs and applications that come in) but now I need to redesign the entry page because quite frankly, it’s so 1999. Not to mention that several volunteers with access to the html files did some rather outre markup — the kind that really just does not hold up well over time, although it doubtless served the purpose at the time (I did immediately change the fuscia link hover color to red back in February; there are some things I won’t tolerate ).

I’ve got changes ongoing over here. The most obvious change is of course the switch to css. (There is NO css markup in the current version of the site; I plan to change this.) The other thing is that I didn’t know of the Perl::CGI module when I initially wrote the scripts, so everything is pretty much done by hand. I’ll have to work on that aspect of it more slowly. The immediate goal here is to get the website “freshened up”.

To that end, the index file has been getting a makeover, and at present looks like this. This is an html-only mockup, I’ll be creating new perl routines for the headers and footers now that I think I have the layout where I want it.