RFS Website Information

Reaching Forward South's first website was created in 2003, and was hosted on server space provided by the Northern Illinois Library System (NILS), now part of the Prairie Area Library System (PALS).

The first generation of the website was hand-coded, and ultimately required a large amount of time to maintain and update. It was moved to a separate hosting service, ICDSoft, in 2004, and later re-designed.

The second generation of the site was constructed using an open-source web design program called Nvu, making it much easier to design and update. This version of the site was used for two years.

This is the third generation of the Reaching Forward South website, and is again hand-coded. It has been designed for greater usability, and to adhere to a much higher level of xhtml and css standards compliance. A fair amount of time has gone into making the structure of the pages as straightforward as possible, thus keeping site maintenance relatively quick and easy.

The page design for this version of the RFS site was inspired by a demonstration page designed by Eric A. Meyer. This design, with it's use of only xhtml and css (the menu uses no javascript... really!), allows for greater accessibility, as well as a cleaner design.

Although this site is designed to work with the current versions of Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, and the Mozilla family (Firefox, Netscape, SeaMonkey, Camino, etc.), it is best viewed using Firefox. The primary tools used in development were Filezilla and SciTE.

The books used for reference while creating this site were CSS Anthology by Rachel Andrew, CSS Pocket Reference by Eric A. Meyer, and Sams Teach Yourself CSS in 24 Hours by Kynn Bartlett.

The W3C HTML validator, at http://validator.w3.org/ was an invaluable resource and is highly recommended for all web design projects.