About the Leclair Website

This section gives some information on how you can find your way around  this site, and what tools are used to maintain it. The information starts with the basics, and gets increasingly detailed.. If something isn't working for you, and this section doesn't supply an answer, you may find help in the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page. You're always welcome to Email me at lesleclair@geocities.com, and I'll do what I can to help.

Before we go much further, I should introduce myself. This website is maintained by Doug Elliott, Johanne's husband. Although I work with computer networks, this is the first and only website I've ever built. It's been a learning experience to say the least, and a lot of fun. This site went on the air on December 12, 1998.

Finding Your Way Around the Website

If you're reading this, then you seem to have already found our site, and passed from the home page to this "site info" page. You've already done the basic steps you need to find your way around the site. The underlined yellow "site info" text you clicked your mouse button on to get here is called a "link". This is a reasonable name because it creates a link to another page. When you take ordinary text, and embed these links that let you jump around, it becomes "hyper-text".

The program you use to look at website pages is called a browser, and is likely from either Netscape or Microsoft. Either will work fine on this website, and they both work the same for the simple stuff that I do.

One important button, usually found in the top left corner of the browser window is the "Back" button. This undoes the the last link you followed, and puts you back where you were before you clicked on it. In other words, it lets you back up one step. Whne you do this, you'll notice that the text for the link has changed colour, in our case to a tan colour. This is to let you know that you've already followed, or "visited" that link. You can always follow it again if you want.

To find your way around this site, all you really need to know is how to follow a link, and how to backup a step or two.

The key part of this site is the "News and Views" section which has a link at the top of the table in the home page. Anytime anything is changed on this site, I put some information into the News section, along with links to the new stuff. You never need to search around to see what's changed, because it's all described in the News. You can always use the Back button to work your way back to the News page.

You can go directly from the home page to other pages which contain information on a particular topic such as family history, the pictures that have been added to the site, or the Email addresses for the online members of the extended Leclair family.

Here's a picture that shows the overall structure of the pages on this site:

You've probably noticed that I've snuck some canoeing information in, as denoted by the light blue sections above. You're certainly welcome to explore it, but it's primarily aimed at the guys I go on canoe trips with. You might find something interesting in the online maps, my archive of 30 years of canoe trips, our tips & tricks, or maybe my camping poetry. Same approach to navigation - just follow the links, starting with the "Mr Canoehead" link on the home page.

How This Site is Maintained

To build and modify the pages, I use AOLpress, which is a free tool I saw recommended in a magazine. It's not fancy, but it works well for a beginner like me, and you don't need to understand all the details of HTML.

I happen to use the Microsoft Internet Explorer Version 4 browser, because it's the standard where I work. There's nothing too fancy on this site, and I expect almost any version of any modern browser should work, including Netscape. I build the pages in a 1024 x 768 x 256 colour environment, and try to check how the pages look using a 800 x 600 screen resolution with 65,000 colours. It works fine using 256 colour mode, except that the pictures don't look as good.

Plans for the future include converting the picture to optimized GIF format so they load faster, and maybe starting to use Microsoft Front Page to maintain the site when I get braver.

I'm open to questions and suggestions - just Email me.

Which reminds me about possible Email problems. The place where I work has had some problems with Email spammers forging our address as their From: address. To make a long story short, some Internet providers may block Email sent to and/or from my work address. The best way to reach me about this site is to Email me at the address

     lesleclair@geocities.com

The second best way is to try my work Email address, which is

    doug.elliott@londonlife.com

I have converted the mail links from this site to use the first address above.

Cheers!

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