Site design and software

Site designers
Technical design: what software provides our interactive features, and where to get it.
Interface design: how we improved usability and raised our search engine rankings.

Site designers

Peter Donovan is our technical wizard. Wilma Keppel did most of the graphic and interface design. Both of us wrote a bunch of the articles. We welcome your comments and suggestions.

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Technical design

Most of Managing Wholes is standard HTML. It loads fast, and search engines index it well. To provide interactivity, parts of the site run on specialized software:

Our searchable photo gallery runs on Gallery, an open-source web photo album system written in PHP.
Our quizzes run on Quirex PHP, which is open-source shareware.
Our listserves (email discussion grousp) run on ezmlm. We can set up temporary or ongoing listserves for those who need them — contact us for details.

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Interface design

This site is designed to load fast, work well on any browser, and get good search engine rankings. Some of the elements include:

Easy navigation.
A search box on every page.
Consistent look and function across the site.
Fast-loading pages. Site graphics are set up to load in the background, after the page content has loaded.
Support for many browsers and window sizes. Try it: resize this window!
User-chosen fonts and font size. (Your browser picked this font. How to change it.)
Printer-friendly versions of most articles.
Unique content, such as our land restoration section.
Web-optimized documents that match how people read online. (The bold text on this page helps people skim for the content they want.)
Support for disabled users.
Valid HTML and CSS (cascading style sheets).
Meta-tagging. Meta tags are invisible text that describes a web page—author, copyright, content descriptions, date, etc. Search engines use meta tags when indexing web pages. Some list each page's description meta tag.