About the Band
The band’s purpose is not only to serve the school and community through marching in parades and playing at football games, thus providing entertainment and enhancing school and community spirit, but also to furnish the student with an invaluable experience. The disciplines of a good band are similar to those acquired in athletics. Both develop coordination, cooperation, teamwork and self-discipline to a degree not possible in academic subjects. The band is no haven for a lazy student. It demands and develops concentration essential to success in any subject or endeavor.
See the Handbook for specifics about the directors and the program.
About the Site
This website was redesigned from the ground up using Web Standards with a content-out methodology. The goal was to develop a consistent, easy-to-navigate website that provides you with everything you need to know about being in the band.
The site was designed and created by Todd DeDecker. Content comes from the previous version of the site as well as numerous other band related sites. There really is a whole world of information out there.
References
The following aided in the research and study of both web standards as well as modern techniques for designing and implementing web sites.
- Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML, Elisabeth Freemand & Eric Freeman, 2006
- Head First Web Design, Ethan Watrall & Jeff Siarto, 2009
- transcending CSS: the fine art of web design, andy clarke, 2007
- The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, Jason Beaird, 2007
The following websites and tools helped with the design and creation of the website.
- Color Scheme Designer, Petr Stanicek's online application for creating color schemes.
- WriteMaps, a site designed to help organize your website design.
- Share-It's BetterJPG was used to compress the images for the photo gallery.
- Polaroid technique used on some photos from digital inspiration tech a la carte. Very cool stuff!
The site was created using Microsoft Expression Web 3. A professional design tool for creating standards-based websites. From a state-of-the-art design surface to support for a wide range of essential technologies, this will have you creating beautiful websites in no time at all.
The search services is provided by Bing Box (http://www.bing.com/siteowner). You can also refer to http://www.bing.com/webmaster for specifics on the indexing and any issues encountered.
Music Clipart from WebWeaver: http://www.webweaver.nu/clipart/music/notes.shtml
Special Thanks
The following have developed Silverlight applications for displaying our photos and playing our music.
Vertigo for their Slide.Show Silverlight application used in our gallery. Note - do not use the ampersand in the title or description - must be interpreted as a tag or special symbol.
Mark Heath for his
Silverlight Audio Player used in our performance gallery.
* Disabled pending band performance copyright discussion.
Website Notes
webhero.com is our hosting service and has a few quirks.
- The home page must be named index.html so visiting lamarmsband.org will display something.
- I was unable to publish from within a corporate firewall (had to use the webhero site manually).
- Filenames are case sensitive!
- In the header the following meta tag was added to avoid
getting the IE8 Compatibility View button. Not sure what caused
it to show up, but I added the meta tag to avoid rendering
issues until I do.
- http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge"
Webmaster To Do List
- A ... [IP] Get updated list of Private Lesson Teachers
- C ... [IP] Add accomplishments of the band
- C ... Figure out how to better document to-do lists (consider a special list, with types: CSS, content etc.)
- C ... Consider a form (email) to capture volunteer info
- C ... Add Support your Band - spirit wear, decals, lawn things
- D ... Add secondary navigation for all pages except detault.html (include Bing Box)
- D ... Add a mobile page (m.lamarmsband.org) to the site
- D ... Consider RSS Feed to the main page news items
- D ... Continue to incorporate microformats into the website
- R ... Ways to deal with content updating (news, events etc.) vs. just modifying the html, but not ASP
- R ... Is there a way to make a macro? #director=Alan Hanna #assoc_director=Danielle Walkenhorst
- R ... Review the form work for XHTML strict - need to make it compliant.
- T ... Document test paths (links, page titles etc.)
- T ... Site must be clean: 0, 0, 0!
A=Action, C=Content, D=Design, R=Research, T=Testing