Solo Flight

by Gary W. Priester

A Makeover for the Solo-Parents Network

• The lady has moxie: How one special mom, Robin, turned a divorce and an aging 486 computer into Web site for solo parents.
• e-chat and lingerie: My first visit to soloparentsnetwork.com.
• Fonts and fun: Searching for fun and focus, I discovered a font called Mini Pics Lil People.
• Designing for the customer: Consider the majority of your audience and design for it, whether that means restricting your use of sound and animation or limiting your screen size to accommodate WebTV.
• In good form: With Response-O-Matic, you can avoid browser problems with forms , and there's only a small price to pay—an ad banner.
• Reality check: When you're done, review everything on different browsers and even on WebTV.
• Afterthoughts: With NetObjects Fusion, Robin can add pages as she gains time and resources, including pages to address money, house maintenance, and other issues that affect single parents.
   

The lady has moxie!

The intriguing return address on the e-mail message read, MoxieLady@aol.com. Upon reading the message, I discovered the MoxieLady was  Robin, a solo parent of five children. As I read the story of how her Web site came to be, I realized the writer was one very special person.

After getting divorced in 1997, Robin went back to school, graduating with honors. In the school's computer lab, Robin discovered the Internet and the Web as ways to do research on-line. But, spending time there was costly, in terms of time away from her family and money spent on baby sitters. Money was precious and in short supply in those days. A home computer and an Internet hookup was the answer.

Robin's ex-husband took the family's good computer with him after the divorce, leaving her with a woefully underpowered and extremely memory-challenged 486 computer. With the help of a book on basic computer maintenance from the local bookstore, Robin discovered ways to breathe new life into the old computer, making it a workable and usable Web-surfing machine. About the same, a free AOL CD-ROM arrived in the mail with hours of free access time, and, just like that, MoxieLady was on-line and ready to surf.

At the same time, Robin was seeking new friends. As all her current friends were married, another method of making friends was called for. MoxieLady searched cyberspace for a site catering to single parents and came up short. So, the Solo-Parents Network was founded to fill this void and to provide a cyber meeting place for single male and female parents and their kids.

Nest building

Using the same moxie that gained her a 3.7 grade point average in school, Robin learned how to build a Web site. She scoured the Web to find a resource for conferencing in one place, a mailing list manager somewhere else. She wrote the basic HTML in Wordpad and created many of the graphics in CorelDRAW.

Little by little, the site began to grow. This Robin was building a nest. Robin discovered NetObjects Fusion and WYSIWYG Web-page layout design when she happened upon eFuse.com. She decided to write the Makeover Maven and ask for help. That's where I come in. Help is my middle name (actually, some suspect that Willard is, but it's not, and it's not important, so don't even ask me)!

Here's what I found when I first visited soloparentsnetwork.com. The site's home page featured an animated WELCOME, an ad banner, a guest book with animated quill pen, a drop-down list, over which the site's philosophy was written, "Time Is Rare for Single Parents, Use the drop-down list to surf to where you want to go... Fast !" and a few other bits of linked copy. As I checked out the different pages, I discovered some cool stuff, such as the page where you can create a free greeting card in one of more than a dozen languages. You can add a picture of your choice and even add a bit of music, if appropriate.

The Healthy Relations Lingerie page was obviously a way to generate income, a la Tupperware parties, as was the Discounts and Savings page and some of the other pages. The Add a Link to This Site turned out to be a series of existing links to which one or two new links could be added. This appeared to be just another gimmick offered to home-based Webmasters such as Robin to generate traffic to other sites. While this was ambitious and showed Robin to be an entrepreneur, I felt this commercial content detracted from the credibility of the site. Most of this was old and/or unrelated content and offered little to the solo-parent visitor.

The Community page linked to a free conferencing and e-chat site operated by anexa.com. This was a good addition, because if you can build a community via chat and conferencing, you can keep visitors coming back. And the more visitors, the better chance of attracting sponsors and getting the site to pay for itself.

The first steps

While I admired Robin's resourcefulness and ambition, I felt the site was lacking in focus. To her credit, Robin was aware of this and that was why she contacted me. We agreed the site needed to look more fun and inviting--a place where parents could take their kids. Even though the drop-down list was the fast way to access the pages on the site, it was too mechanical and unwelcoming. So, the drop-down list was jettisoned into cyberspace.

I looked at a font called Mini Pics Lil People (available from EyeWire), which had fun figures of moms and kids. These images were light and fun and would create a nice atmosphere. Next, I assembled a lively palette of colors that I would use for all of the site graphics. I used a free font called Good Dog Cool, part of a three-font suite, Good Dog, Good Dog Cool, and Good Dog Bones, (a symbols font).

All are available for free from FontHead Design. This added a light touch to the site.

I placed five of the Mini Pics mom and kid symbols in different colors atop a long purple rectangle that was 314 pixels wide by 1,600 pixels deep. I used this to create a tiling background GIF image. As huge as the image is, it's only about 5K because of the relatively small area of different colors. The bottom of the background image would be well below most pages and on the few overly long pages where it would reappear, it would come as a pleasant surprise!

One of my concerns with the original site was user hardware, or lack of same. Before I obtained a sound card, if I went to a site that attempted to play music and then produced an insulting error message when it could not locate my sound card, I would move on and never return. I wanted to avoid this on the solo-parent site. If many of the solo parents had limited incomes, as I suspected they might, I wanted to keep the animation to a minimum and eliminate music and other special effects that, while nice, were not necessary and would gobble up resources and increase download times. Using solid, Web-safe colors also helped keep the files small and byte sized.

Another important consideration, because of the limited income factor, is that many visitors may be visiting the site using WebTV. Because WebTV automatically reduces pages wider than 544 pixels to fit, I made the decision to limit the width of my pages to 544 pixels. And while this felt a little cramped, it was not impossible to live with. WebTV gets really ugly if the page is too wide and especially if it contains a form (which I planned to use). The buttons get truncated with the page and the results are not pretty. So, I learned to live in a space no wider than 544 pixels.

I used a scalloped edge for the top and bottom of the banner and a mirrored single-mom figure on either side. The actual banner is wider, but I shortened it for this illustration.

I repeated the scallop on the right side of the buttons. I debated whether or not to use the JavaScript rollover buttons and then decided, what the heck! In browsers that support rollover buttons, these buttons can add a sense of interaction. I created two images, Top of Page and Return, that I could use as needed.

I created another image that says "Is Your Name Robin?" This will be used to link to Robin's Robins page, a page listing people named Robin and their Web sites and/or e-mail addresses. One of my favorite pages on the site, by the way.

Animated comings and goings

I created two simple animations for the Community page, one for the chat area and one for the conference area. The animation helps to illustrate the difference between chatting and conferencing via a bulletin board setup. Both of these link to the anexa.com site, which provides these community services for free. The motivation for companies such as anexa.com is advertising; anexa.com can deliver a targeted audience that is very appealing to advertisers.

I modified another Mini Pics font called Lil Creatures (available from EyeWire.com), a whimsical bird on wheels, and created a simple animation with the individual letters R-o-b-i-n coming out of the bird's beak in reverse order.

The animation will be on the first page along with a minimal amount of copy. A small line of text instructs visitors to click on the Robin to enter the site. The reason for the brevity is to get the page to download quickly, even on older, slower modems, and to give the visitor a taste of what's inside.

In good form

Forms are so easy to create in NetObjects Fusion that I like to use them whenever possible to provide feedback. Visitors can use the form to sign the guest book and add their comments, and then Robin can paste their responses into the existing guest book page. However, while you can specify your e-mail address and have the contents of the form submitted to you via e-mail, certain browsers balk at this and launch the e-mail client instead of sending the message. This is confusing and frustrating to the visitor  and might even discourage the visitor from returning to your site.

Daniel Will-Harris, editor of eFuse, turned me onto a cool free service called Response-O-Matic, which forwards the form contents to you after processing the form on its site. The whole process takes seconds. (http://www.response-o-matic.com ) Why would Response-O-Matic provide this valuable service for free, I wondered. When I tested my form, I noticed an ad banner on the confirmation page. That's why. But, we can live with that.

You create your form in Fusion, then go to Form Settings (from the Settings button on the Forms Property palette).

Select POST as the method; click on the + key; and key in "your_email_address" in the Name: text entry box and your actual e-mail address in the Value: text entry box. (The name and value dialog is not shown here). This tells Response-O-Matic where to mail the response. It is important when you create the name and e-mail address text entry boxes (Forms Edit Field ) that you name the first "visitor_name" and the second "visitor_email_address" (with underscores and no quotation marks).

Response-O-Matic looks for this exact wording and adds it to the reply portion of the e-mail submission. I tested the forms in three different browsers and had success in all three. My response was waiting as soon as I opened my e-mail application. For more information on how to use Response-O-Matic's service with NetObjects Fusion, visit the Workbench.

Reality check

As I mentioned earlier, I took into consideration that many visitors to Robin's site would be accessing the site using WebTV. To make sure that everything would work OK, I opened the site in the WebTV viewer. As you can see, sometimes it helps to design to the lowest common denominator. Everything looked swell. The form buttons were fine, their text was readable, and all of the pages displayed well.

I should point out that WebTV supports your choice of fonts—so long as it's Helvetica! All HTML fonts are converted to Helvetica and the size is increased. The reason for the size increase is that very few people watch television from a distance of 16 inches. The obnoxious yellow box around the Home button indicates that this is a linked graphic.

A useful addition to the WebTV viewer is a separate window called Page Notes. This flags potential problems as each page is viewed. The problem highlighted with the red ellipse informs me that the Table was Too Wide and has been shrunk. Not shrunk very much if you ask me. Oddly, the first flagged problem is an unrecognized tag <!-->, which is used to hide comments in HTML scripts that may be of use to people viewing and hand-editing the script. Why WebTV does not know this is cause for concern. Most of the other nits deal with unrecognized font tags, which is academic anyhow as all fonts are changed to Helvetica. But it's a useful reality check nonetheless. To download the free WebTV Viewer, visit (where else?) http://www.webtv.com.

Afterthoughts

Click here to visit the pages I created for Robin's site makeover. I was very happy with the results of the makeover and hope Robin will be, too. The beauty of using Fusion for this site is once the Site Style has been created, adding new pages is as easy as can be.

What was missing for me in Robin's original site, and I hasten to add that the site is only a few months old and will be constantly changing, are the issues that face single moms and dads and their families. As I developed the pages, ideas came to me that seemed as if they wanted to be included in the site.

Like what, for instance? Well, I thought a section of the community page could have the Solo-Parent's Cookbook, a collection of recipes that could be exchanged. Or how about a Book Review page? Both for kids and adults. Robin rebuilt the family computer, didn't she? What a great section this would be. Tech Talk. How to add memory to your computer. Reasons why your printer won't print. Or how about house maintenance tips? How to replace a washer or install a new faucet? Useful information that the community could contribute to--and benefit from.

Currently the Resources page doesn't have a lot of resources that a solo parent might need. I'd like to see a section for health care. Visitors could share cold remedies, and there should be links to on-line medical advice. Links to child psychology would be useful. Information and/or tips on smoothing the transition from a dual-parent to a single-parent household would be most helpful. Not to mention the opportunity to share experiences, tragedies, and triumphs—community-building experiences that will bring visitors back to the site.

Let's not forget legal issues. Alimony problems, child custody issues, abusive ex-spouses, visitation rights. Sticky stuff like that. There are so many issues specific to solo parents that could be addressed and links to information and on-line help added. Making the site available to kids as well as parents will help build the community. Maybe there could be a photo album where parents could post photos of their kids. Or what about an art gallery? Maybe two galleries, one for kids and one for parents. These are the areas where Robin can really add fun, as well as value, to her site and build the solo-parents community. I applaud Robin on her efforts so far and wish her all the best in the days ahead.

Click here to visit her current site.

About the author

Gary Priester is a partner in The Black Point Group, a Northern California graphic design company. He is the author of Looking Good in Color, Ventana Press and CorelDRAW Studio Techniques, Osborne/Corel Press. E-mail Priester or visit his web site. 

© 1999 Gary W. Priester