The web site is updated at least once a week, typically on Sundays. Sometimes it is additionally updated during the week. The information is gathered from email messages, flyers, print and electronic periodicals and links are gathered from other web sites (obviously). There are over 120 files at the web site, excluding graphics and sound files. At steady state, about one hour per week is spent on the web site updates. Please note that all contents of SSDS web site are copyright SSDS.
You may have noticed that we have a new pictures gallery, powered by Coppermine Photo Gallery http://coppermine-gallery.net/index.php. If you have pictures of an SSDS event that you would like to have added (with full credit) please contact Can Isik.
Our web site is hosted by http://powweb.com/. Super fast downloads/ftp/email, 20 GB disk space, unlimited email accounts, etc, for $7.77 per month. We have been very happy with powweb.com. If you decide to use their services, please fill in syrswingdance.org as your referrer, so we can get 2 months' credit :)
Our earliest dedicated web site (front page) at home.ican.net was visited 5698 times from 8/16/98 until 5/4/99, an average of about 22 hits per day. After we had our own domain name, and moved to icom.com host, we started using an external statistics service. Our average at icom.com was about 30 visits per day, which accumulated 28919 visits until 2/9/2002, totaling 34,617 visits overall. Our current web site is getting about 200 visits per day. You can see our web stats at http://syrswingdance.org/webstats/, with its legend described at http://webalizer.com/webalizer_help.html
The SSDS web site was selected as one of Syracuse's top 5 sites by Sybercuse.com on 7/24/2000.
If you have any questions about the web site, or would like to join the one-person staff ($0 salary with 10% annual raises) please contact Can Isik.
* Ease of loading. We have many members who use dial up services, some with free providers. Their download speed is usually even slower than their modem speeds. Therefore we like to minimize sizes and amount of graphics files. One
easy way is to use text rather than graphics for titles, especially if they have a large size. Font, size, color, etc. may help make it stand out.
* Ease of navigation. The organization of our files is pretty flat. There are
a number of top level pages, with the same navigation bar. This avoids people
having to go to the front page to select another main page.
* Limited use of high tech. We have a lot of members who use dated computers
and browsers. Therefore we avoid java and other script unless they add an
important function.
* Plenty of links to dance terminology and other key words. We get a lot of
traffic from search engines, and from dance newbies. It helps to link words
such as "west coast swing, jitterbug (a.k.a. east coast swing), lindy hop,
hustle". The file that includes those definitions gets a lot of hits. Also,
whereever a venue or a swing organization is mentioned, we put a link to its
map or web site, as appropriate.
* There is a large number of files at our site, and they are all connected. We
like to preserve the old event files, etc, for historic reasons. Besides, we
got more server space than we know what to do with.
* Flat directory structure: The site grew gradually, and we have been keeping a
very simple directory structure. All HTML files are in the main directory,
with sub directories for images, pictures, etc. A more structured directory
may simplify maintenance, but it's a lot of work, and we avoided so far.
* Always up to date. We update the web site at least once a week, usually more
frequently. Our info sources are emails that organizers send me, postings that
we get from other dance lists, dance web sites and groups we visit.
Schedule Page:
* We started using the current two-column format few years back, and got a
lot of positive feedback for that format and for the little nagivation row
(days and months) on top of each column.
* We use the schedule page as the source for our weekly email schedules, so that
all we need to update is the schedule.html file. We formatted it in such a way
that, when we remove the html code using our text editor (notespad, can be found at http://www.newbie.net/NotesPad/), the email is
practically ready to be sent with very little additional formatting.
Web Site Guidelines
General: