About the Web Site

The following notes provide some information about the background to the web site, its development and operation, and its principles and policies. Despite having no web development expertise, though having been the Web Site Director for an IT services company, this first experience of hands on development, maintenance and operation has been fascinating over the last few months, and there are already several areas for significant technology improvement and change.

1. Building the Web Site
The web site has been developed using the Zyweb service. Several similar providers were considered, but Zyweb seemed to provide the right set of tools and facilities for this startup of the web site. Its an online service, which can be quite long winded, and makes a broadband connection pretty much obligatory, so already an offline Web development tool such as Net Objects Fusion, using a Web hosting service might be more effective in the near term, particularly as it enables frames to be used. However, the current approach gives a reasonable idea of what the web site can contain, and if the web site is adopted, then it may well be appropriate/necessary to move to another service provider.

2. Why a Web Site?
The initial idea for the web site sprang out of the Great Sunbed Discussion of January '05 (adopting an expression from the Bristow cartoon strip. Click here if you'd like to see the origin of that phrase - the Great Tea Trolley Disaster of '67.) The thing which became apparent was that in addition to the sunbed discussion there were many interesting issues being raised, yet there was no obvious mechanism for discussion/dissemination other than by floods of emails. Issues included

- progress with Deeds
- uprating electricity
- building a second golf course
- progress with snags
etc. etc.

3. Colours
Once the main sections of the web site were, and the overall layout of buttons, my family gave some very helpful feedback that it would be a good idea to employ the colours of El Rincon Del Golf. Hence you see the colour scheme, and even the text background has a texture, related to that on our external walls. For those who are interested here are the colours, their usage and Pantones, RGB & Hexadecimal numbers which come from the SEO Consultants web site where they have a conversion table for hundreds of different shades.

4. Languages
The site has been developed in English for the simple reason that it is the developer's native language, and the majority of owners are English speaking. Personal experience with translating Spanish user manuals into English makes it clear that you need a native Spanish speaker to get an effective translation. So as a starting point, a Spanish version of every page can be produced by clicking on the Spanish flag in the Alta Vista Babel panel at the bottom of the buttons on the left hand side (and similarly anyone requiring German, Italian, French or Portugese can get these by clicking on the relevant flag). If these translations are not good enough, please feel free to send a correct translation to ElRinconDelGolf@hotmail.com and it will be linked to the relevant page.

5. Search Engines
The Web site will not be registered with any search engines, and so is unlikely to appear on any WWW searches. It is intended to be an assistance for the owners, visitors and friends, and all of then can easily be informed by email etc.. Anything which is confidential (e.g. photos and text about specific properties) will be protected by passwords. Whilst there's nothing confidential about the rest of the site, unnecessary hits may eventually lead to increased charges. So, at this stage there seems no reason why we should deliberately set out to be found, though of course it will be O.K. for other web sites to link to it. Interestingly in mid April 2005, entering "El Rincon Del Golf" on Google results in only 49 hits, most of which are property sales or rental, and this site did not appear. By end May, there were 122 hits.

6. Through the Keyhole
The idea behind "Through the Keyhole" is that owners will wish to be able to tell and show their friends and visitors about their properties, telling them about the facilities it has, items they don't need to bring with them because they are already provided such as beach towels, etc.. Obviously this must be secure to ensure that only people you want to have access can do so. The process would be along the lines of

* Owners would send photos and text about their property by email to the web site administrator at ElRinconDelGolf@hotmail.com
* Once the photos and text are loaded and the owner is satisfied and has selected a username and password it will be added to the list in the Through the Keyhole page
* They would then advise the username and password to their friends and visitors
* Owners could request changes to names and passwords, photos and text whenever required
* Each property would have space for up to 1mb of pictures and 2000 words

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