This
website is the third generation of "official" Mortrag websites. The
original website is hosted by Freewebs (www.freewebs.com), and the
latest two have been hosted by a branch of Yahoo! called Geocities
(www.geocities.com). None of the old sites have been deleted,
as search engines still recognize them; the editors have deemed it best
for them to remain running, and just have them link to here, the
current official page.
The first, www.freewebs.com/mortrag, was created and jointly updated by
both Colter and Max. It was running well, until they both ran
into the limitations of Freeweb's page builder program, which was
heavily template-based and the hosting allowed for barely any storage
space or
bandwidth.
The second website, www.geocities.com/mortrag_inc, was created by
Colter (who chose mortrag_inc because "mortrag" is taken), and
information was put in about the time that Max was working on the
Schmidlak Variety Show website (www.geocities.com/schmidlak) along with
Cooper. Both of these editors stopped working on their sites,
and after a few months, it was decided that a new Mortrag website
should be created on Geocities, partly to get a fresh start from the
design standpoint, and partly because Mortrag is not actually
incorperated, as "mortrag_inc" would imply.
Thus, "mortrag_online" was born, created by Max. The website
underwent multiple initial planning stages, mostly consitiuting of
graphincal designs and site mapping. After that, creation
begun, and the home page was made. Sadly, not long after,
more problems were encountered with the native page building program,
this time with Yahoo's "PageBuilder." Not only are pages
displayed differently than they appear in browsers, but there is
extreme limitation with cross-application work and HTML incorperation.
This site was then frozen for a few months, and the new
official Mortrag page appeared to have met the same fate as the last
two.
But this is not the case. What you see here is the result of hours upon
hours of searching,
compairing, testing, and applying multiple programs and hosts. For
hosting, a Mortrag account on Google's "Googlepages" was created;
Google would be used to host the site, as it is ad-free, but it does
not allow for the HTML freedom that Yahoo! does. The option
of paying for hosting servies was highly considered, but the benefits
were too small for this nonprofit group. Corel R.A.V.E. 2.0
has been applied to make fully animated buttons, as well as member
profiles, updates, and menu markers. This helps the website
look the same on multiple browsers, as text can be read differently,
but pictures remain the same. The most difficult decision to
make was regrading what program would be used to construct the site
itself. Finally, Nvu was settled on, and it has proved itself
to be a terrific HTML editor, sporting elements of the code used to
make Mozilla's Firefox and Thunderbird.
Safari,
the broswer used natively in Macintosh systems, misreads the codes for
the animated buttons on the side and top menus of the site, and
displays them with the opposite animations. Microsoft's
Internet Explorer displays the buttons with dreadfully slow animation
times (the gif files play slowly). For these reasons,
Mozilla's Firefox
is stronly recommended for the viewing of this site.
This top-rated browser is safe, fast, and, most importantly,
animated gif files at their normal speed.
Due to Yahoo!'s annoying side bar, the recommended resolution for
viewing this site is 1280 x 1024 or above. However, more
common resolutions such as 1024 x 768 display the website fine also,
but the sidebar will have to be clicked away on every page that is
viewed in order to see it properly.
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| Copyright (C) 2006 Mortrag
group. All Rights Reserved. |
