THE SITE

Ten Year Anniversary of the Site. 

The site has now been published to the Internet for ten years.  A bit hard to believe and a good time to reflect on our effort.  We have taken the site from a simple four page affair to more than twenty-five main pages linked to five-hundred sub pages.  If you include the thumbnail images with captions there are over 5000 images on the site.  The Internet has changed radically in these ten years all across the board from the underlying html code to broadband access.  In 2003, when this site was first published, we were required to design web pages for 56k modem access.  We certainly don't design sites today for modem access even though many people in the United States living near large metropolitan areas still do not have broadband. 

What will the next ten years bring to this web site?  For the future we are planning to create a Facebook presence - but probably not a twitter feed or a blog.  We would like to develop a light box system for the sale of individual images and plan to start making our own videos.  We will continue to add photo galleries, trip reports and related content to all of the main pages.  We have recently started to name motels, restaurants and other businesses that we encounter on trips in the Trip Reports section.  There are many great business in the Colorado Plateau and we have no problem recommending good stuff.  We want to add more routes to the Mileage page and reverse all the routes.  We plan to continue to review You Tube , Vimeo and the rest of the Internet for good HD videos of the Colorado Plateau region for the Video page.  We will probably split off a Canyoneering section on the Links page and possibly add a Sustainability section.  We are always on the lookout for good web cams for the region on the Web Cams page - good web cams are hard to find.

Our intent is to add new material at least once a month so check the What's New page at least once a month and the Buy Calendar page once a year - and buy the calendar.  Speaking of the calendar we have changed the size for the 2014 from 11"x 12.25" to 11"x 14" to produce a more landscape format.  This allows an uncropped image to be used in the calendar and provides more room for the over 500 date block entries.

Jim Ridge

March 31, 2013

Just a brief note. We are in the process of rebuilding the entire site using the W3C DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional code. This will take some time. We are transitioning in-place and publishing as opposed to generating a new separate site and publishing. We have already updated the main pages but the process simply takes time due to the large volume of supporting pages. After rebuilding it can certainly be said that using CSS makes a night and day difference in the amount of code that drives a page. Obviously, the visitor does not see the code but should notice increased speed in page loading. Thank you for your patience.

Regarding the addition of a shopping cart on the site. We had so many problems in our effort to install a shopping cart that We do not recommend this except for a professional full time webmaster who has knowledge of all of the complexities that are involved. Not only is a full shopping cart complex in it's application on the site it is fairly expensive to maintain. We are researching newer approaches to selling items on the Internet like the "widgets" that Paypal and Google now offer.

Jim Ridge

May 12, 2010

We have not updated this page recently because our site goals have not changed in the six years that this site has been published to the Internet. Over this past six years we have modestly revised the format of site in the form of added pages and images with the intent of describing the area more clearly and providing a tool for planning trips in the Colorado Plateau region. Currently we are in the process of changing our webpage authoring software from Frontpage 2002 to Expression Web 2. Microsoft has transitioned to Expression Web and no longer supports Frontpage. This is no small transformation in that it is an evolution from "Web 1" of simple "html" to "Web 2" of more complex xhtml, css and asp.net. Although Expression Web is more complex it does represent the future of the Internet with more control over content and added capabilities. The simplicity of "Web 1" is being lost because of the success of the Internet. We are not sure this is a good thing but it is the reality that exists.

We attempted to install a "shopping cart" on the site in November of 2008 to provide a method to market the 2009 Calendar but found that there were unexpected complications due to the "cart" that we purchased. Our cart requires "SQL Server" to manage it's database. Our current Web Host only supports "MySQL Server, a light version of "SQL Server". As a result we will need to migrate our site to a Web Host who provides support for a "SQL Server" database. So in the near future this site will be required for a short time to use a temporary URL link to direct you to our new Web Host.

We would like to express our thanks to those who visit this site and would like you to know that from January 1, 2008 to early December 2008 this site had over 1,000,000 hits. For all of 2008 the site had 1,054,545 total hits, 120,034 total page views and 83,356 individual visitors. We are very proud of this and thank those who visit. We intend to keep adding images, expand the mileage page and would still like to develop a maps page.

Jim Ridge

February 14, 2009

The intent of the site is threefold: First; to promote a scenic calendar titled "Exploring The Colorado Plateau". Second; To share some of the photography, trip information, and research sources used to plan photo trips. Third; to generate a tool that can be used to evaluate past trips, research new trips and simply record what we has been accomplished. The site is generated on a PC using Microsoft's "Frontpage 2002" by myself and will always be a work in progress. We do as much as we can to reduce load time but some of the photo galleries have more images than others and will simply take some time to load. If you are lucky and have broadband service they load very quickly-if you are on a modem be patient. Please view the site in full screen mode (i.e. without the favorites side bar).

The site as of this writing has been posted to the Internet for eighteen months - March of 2003. We originally outlined five goals in the last paragraph of the "About Us" page. We have accomplished a good portion but not all of our original "goals" In the next 18 months we intend to finish our original goals and refine and enlarge the site. Since the focus of the site is primarily photographic we will continue to add images. We will also keep up with and enlarge the trip reports and experiment with the site format. We will divide the current home page into several pages because of it's size. I do not plan to make this a commercial site only in that we want to promote interest in the calendar. We would like to add a page that provides mileage between locations in this region and do more to utilize maps. The process of generating this site has been a lot of work and also very rewarding. We have had 17, 747 visitors and 26, 121 page views since September 1, 2003 from all over the world and hope to provide a more refined and useful site in the future. See the "About us" page for more information on the site and the calendar. See the " About the Calendar" site for more information on the calendar.

Jim Ridge

October 10, 2004

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