Every now and then I hear somebody try to solve the ever present “communication” problem that is inherent with recreational activities by suggesting “just do a website.”  Right.  I’m certain that the originator of that statement figures the effort will take about the same time as shampooing one’s hair.  Entertaining material of the highest quality will simply leap onto the screen out of thin air.  Millions will flock to the site to receive up-to-the-minute updates on the meaning of life.  Uh huh.

Unfortunately, most of that enthusiasm dies quickly about 45 minutes into the effort, when the author just can’t get the formatting to look exactly like those super-duper websites that have a staff of 500 professional graphic artists working on them day and night.  Once photos of the family pet has been prominently placed on the main page, the “Under Construction” sign is permanently left as a reminder to the handful who might stumble onto the site that they are indeed, closed for business.

After a year of maintaining The Usual Suspects website, I can truthfully equate it to a prison term at a minimum security institution.  You have some flexibility on the content, but you can never leave it alone for very long, else face the humiliation of the “Under Construction” Club.

What a Website REALLY Means

The Usual Suspects website consumes 15 to 20 hours of my time each month in order to produce a relatively small amount of material that is readable.  Making that 1st of every month deadline is absolutely necessary in order to maintain the  readership that has been built up over time.  Miss one deadline, and readers stop coming, it’s as simple as that.

I get up every morning an hour and a half before normal, weekends included, and try to put in at least an hour writing, formatting, editing, or planning.  No exceptions.  Some days, total garbage is produced, that has to be later thrown out.  Other days, the BS flows like water.

There is always the concern that you will run out of material, especially in the summer, as the time between Caribbean visits is extended.  There are weeks when the number of daily hits to the site barely registers on the scale, making you wonder if there is really anybody out there.

Basic Principles

When I sat down to envision the site, I came up with a number of guiding principles to ensure that proper focus and direction was maintained.  I thoroughly field-tested these concepts with a number of associates, and fine-tuned them until I felt they were right.  They included the following:

• The target audience would be the bareboat charter guest, down on a 7 -10 day vacation.  They did not have a lot of time, and wanted to be sure they experienced the best of what an anchorage had to offer.  The website would provide recommendations and advice for that guest on what to experience, what to avoid.
  
  
• This would not attempt to be the Doyle Guide.  Chris Doyle has already put together  an excellent guide to the Windward (and Leeward) Islands, so there was no need to copy that fine work.  I was more interested in rooting out great Caribbean “experiences,” rather than sights and attractions.  I was prepared to make strong recommendations and back them up with reasons, so that the reader could decide for themselves if that experience was for them or not.  I was not in the business of compiling and maintaining directories of services.
  
  
• This would not be a commercial site.  While I do have a boat that people can charter, soliciting charter business was not the prime goal.  At the very most, it is possible that somebody will read about the Grenadines, decide that they want to experience them, ask a few questions, and possibly become a Suspect by chartering the boat.
  
  
• The site would contain original material, not just links to other websites of common interest.  Trip reports should be entertaining and contain vivid (and hopefully heavily embellished) descriptions of the vacation experience, not simply a recant of every single thing the vacationer did, such as “we went there, we went here.”  That does not make for great reading in my opinion.  Material should be light, humorous, descriptive, and entertaining as possible.
  
  
• The site must be updated on a regular and predictable manner.  There is no quicker way to destroy readership than to encourage people to “Come Back Soon,” only to find the “Under Construction” sign permanently stuck on the main page.  Eventually, they go away for good.
  
  It was decided that one update on the first of every month provided a reasonable balance between frequent updates and quality material.  While I would like to do this full-time, I have a day job.  More frequent updates could be achieved at the expense of quality material. 
  
  
• It was envisioned that the site would encourage other travelers to write about their experiences and publish them on this site.  Guest articles would take some of the pressure off me to produce material every month.

Design and Implementation

The design and presentation of the website was intended to be simple, clean, uncluttered, easy to navigate - nothing fancy.  It would be used as a vehicle to experiment on presentation styles and techniques.  Websites are still a relatively new communications tool, and the book is still being written on effective use of the media.  Using feedback from readers, various presentation techniques have evolved. 

It was decided that there would be four basic sections:  The Boat, The Suspects, The Experiences, and The Adventures:

• The Experiences was essentially intended to be the destinations section, containing all the information required when visiting a particular destination.  I wanted it to contain more than a list of things that were available.  I wanted guests to understand the special qualities of an anchorage, and experience it, not just see it.  This included the sights, sounds, special people, and experiences that you must live to really appreciate the place.  As more destination Experiences are written, they remain online, resulting in a growing library of destination information.
  
  
• The Adventures was intended to be the storytelling section.  Here, anybody could describe their trip for others to read about.  Different than The Experiences section, an adventure is only lived once, where an experience can be reproduced every time you visit.  Adventures also remain online, forming an online catalogue of past trips.
  
  
• I tossed in a small section that describes The Boat and The Suspects only as a last minute idea to have a little fun with.  I am still surprised by the number of hits these sections receive, and the number of comments I receive as a result of them.
  
  
• With updates every month, it is difficult for the reader to remember what has changed on the site.  To assist, a What’s New in This Month’s Update section was developed to form a “quick index”, pointing to new Experiences, Adventures, Suspects that have been added in the current month.  A Coming Attractions section documents future planned articles.  A place to review and add reader Comments, and a brief description of the purpose of the website rounds out the menu.

The main menu always stays the same, but like a magazine, the background photo changes every month.  I try to choose a photo that matches some new story that appears in that update, however it is very difficult to find the exact photo that can be blown up to 1030 * 615 pixels without becoming distorted, and is less than 50K in size, to facilitate a reasonably quick download.  The most difficult part of the photo is selecting one that looks reasonable on small, medium, and large monitors that display anywhere from 640*480 to 1024*768 pixels.  The smaller screen size chops the right and bottom off, meaning the the point of interest in the photo must be in the upper left side.  The photo must also have lots of meaningless background on the right and bottom in case the reader has a large screen.

Anyone familiar with hypertext (HTML) formatting understands that it is a “markup” language, not a formatting language.  You simply cannot control the presentation when the user expands and contracts the browser window.  There are well-known tricks that you can use to help, specifically, the heavy use of  the “table” with fixed column widths.  Pages on this website use a single 750-pixel table, meaning that the material will never exceed that width, even if the user has a very large monitor.  That size also fits nicely on most notebooks.  Within that table, I implemented a left-side table of 150-pixels to form an empty margin called a scholar’s rule, and a 600-pixel table on the right to contain the text content.

Selecting text fonts and sizes was a real lesson in patience.  There are millions of the damn things, all intended to consume huge amounts of time while you try them out.  In the end, I chose good ol’ Times New Roman as the standard reading and paragraph title font.  For page titles, I selected Bradley Hand ITC bold italic, size 36, 22, and 18, which looks like hand printing.  Because most users have not installed this font on their systems, it was necessary to create these titles in JPG format using Microsoft Image Composer.

It took about two weeks of fooling around with the formatting to get the paragraph size, shape, and font standards defined.  It is amazing how much time is burned up on tiny visual details.  The problem is, if you don’t, the presentation looks real bad, and distracts the reader from the material at hand.  The results of all this effort produced a simple layout format that didn’t annoy too many people. 

I used Microsoft FrontPage as the HTML editor, and enabled the Web Server that came with it on my system at home.  I registered the domain name  “usual-suspects-sailing.com” through my local ISP, Echo Online, and had them set up a virtual web hosting site, for $25 CAD per month.  On the first of every month, I select the “Publish Web” option on FrontPage, and it uploads all the changed pages from my local server to the one on the Internet, making it available for all to see.  Then, I go to work on next month’s update, working on it and testing it on my home system.  Very convenient.

A Vicious Cycle

So, how does an update get completed?  First off, I need a steady stream of material.  Ideas materialize at various times for subject matter, most of which originates from a vacation on the boat.  Such a trip provides material for an Adventure, and if the destination is new, an Experience.  Other related ideas stem from that, and sometimes I have a guest article from another visitor.

In order to ensure a steady stream of material for updates, especially during the long periods when I am not on the boat, I must pace myself.  It is also not possible to dump all ideas onto the site in a one-month period.  I have developed a rolling 6-month plan for such material.  I might have a recent Adventure scheduled for next month, an article about trip planning for the following month, a trip report from a charter guest the month after that, and an Experience resulting from a future trip to a new destination scheduled for the month after that.  Whenever I get an idea for the website, I slot it somewhere into the 6-month plan.

The plan also contains scheduled updates and corrections, as well as routine monthly items such as changing the background photo, margin, navigation buttons, archiving the News page, creating a new one, as well as updating the Comments and Coming Attractions page.  Nothing gets left off the plan.

The very day after an update is published on the Internet, I begin work on the next month.  If it does not look like a lot of work, I might give myself a break from the site for about 10 days, but that’s about it.  I set my alarm clock to wake me an hour and a half earlier than normal, and put that time into producing this site, every day, weekends included.

If I have a large article to write, it is necessary to get working on it right away.  You can only produce about a page and a quarter of decent text in one day.  Most of my articles are in the 12 - 16 page range, so it takes me about 10 - 12 days just to produce the first draft.  Each review and copy edit takes two days, and I usually conduct three full reviews of every article.  This gets me to the 15th or 20th day of the month.

Before the article can be moved over to the test website, blank HTML pages must be created and tested in FrontPage with the correct margin size, navigation buttons, background margin, titles, and headers.  This alone usually consumes about 2 hours.  Once the blank pages are ready, the article, usually in Microsoft Word format, is moved to FrontPage using cut-and-paste, then reformatted paragraph by paragraph.

Photos are usually a part of every article.  Originally, it was necessary to scan them from prints.  This was time consuming because my scanner is not the best, and most scanned photos require a fair bit of correction, specifically in cropping, brightness, contrast, tone, sharpness correction, and inserting a drop shadow.  Correcting an individual photo may take up to an hour before it is of presentable quality.  Since the acquisition of a digital camera, I work from JPG files of much better quality.  It is still necessary to crop and adjust the brightness and contrast, but to a much lesser extent.  In the end, about 8 hours is consumed adding photos for a 12 - 16 page article.  Once the photos are in, a final review of the article is conducted to ensure complete integrity.

I have recently begun placing a downloadable/printable copy of some articles online in Adobe Postscript (PDF) format.  This is generated from the original Microsoft Word version of the article, so I must go back to that version, add the photos, and complete its page formatting.  The title page, page headers and footers, Table of Contents, all must be completed in the document before converting it to Postscript, placing it on the test website, and adding the link to it from the article.

The completion of the main article usually gets me to the 25th day of the month.  At that time, I must add a reference to the article in the appropriate Adventures or Experiences section, as well as the News section for the month.  Then the usual monthly items are completed, such as updating the background photo, margin, navigation buttons, archiving of last month’s News, Comments, Attractions, etc.  Finally, with everything in place, I test, test, test!!!

When the first day of the next month arrives, I select the  “Publish Web” function in FrontPage, and the entire set of updated pages and images are automatically uploaded to the www.usual-suspects-sailing.com website on the Internet for all to see.

Before collapsing in exhaustion, I send out about 140 e-mails to people on my distribution lists, as well as post a notice on the rec.boats.cruising and rec.travel.caribbean Newsgroups, reminding readers that the update is available.

Only then do I pour myself a Rummer.

Why?

So, the next time you hear somebody say “just do a website,” think of what you have just read.  This is a huge effort and a continuous commitment.  Given that, one would ask the obvious question, Why???

Basically, cruising lazily from island to island in the Caribbean has been a major goal of mine for quite some time.  Learning about every aspect of the experience is a major part of achieving that goal, as is meeting other like-minded people and sharing those experiences.  Reliving them by writing about them provides a great deal of enjoyment.  Every now and then, I receive a note from somebody who went down to the Caribbean, experienced many of these things, and had the time of their lives.  Then I know it’s all worth it.