About this Web Site
Welcome to the DC Society of Certified Public Managers' web site. If
you are interested, we would like to introduce you to a few "features"
of the site designed to make your use of it easier.
Printing: Print the textual content from a web site is often a painful experience - you don't get what you see on the screen, words get cut off, etc. Here is what we have done to help you when you print: only the center column of any page will be printed when you use a standards compliant browser to print the page. Why, well, that's where the real content is for starters. Here is how we have set up the site:
Left Side Column: This column is almost completely static, it will rarely change and it will always be the same on every page of the site.
Right Side Column: This column will be used to highlight events, special features, and news on a changing basis. It will be the same on almost all pages, although design constraints have forced us to remove it from a few pages.
Center Column: As already mentioned, this is the real content of any page. As such, it is designed to print in a well formatted way whenever you print a page. We do this, by the way, through the use of cascading style sheets (CSS) for you technically minded readers. Each page has a separate CSS for printing that ensures you can print that center column content.
E-mail addresses: There are none on the site. We are not hiding from you, in fact, we welcome your feedback and discussion. But, instead of displaying e-mail addresses, we have provided links to contact forms, where appropriate (and in the footer on every page). This has been done to help fight SPAM; it prevents Spammers from obtaining our addresses which, in turn, ensures they cannot user our address to send you unwanted mail or overwhelm our mailbox while we look for messages from you. As for discussions and feedback, everyone is invited to make use of the forum section of the site.
File downloads: In most cases where we have provided content in files, whether PDFs, or word processing files, or some other format, we have designed the download process to ensure you have the choice of opening the file and using the content in real-time, or saving the file to a disk on your own computer.
Pop-up Windows: We do not have any. We do, however, allow you to choose to open links to other sites in an additional browser window, but that is a choice you get to make, not one we impose on you. If you are plagued by pop-up windows when viewing other web sites, we recommend you use a browser than can control them, such as FireFox or Netscape, and we can assure you they are not coming from this site.
Technical Stuff: For those interested, here are a few technical details about our site and its design.
Design: As much as possible, we have sought to make the site compliant with modern web design standards, including the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for both appearance styling and positioning functions, and XHTML standards. Our principal development and site management tools are Dreamweaver, WordPerfect, Corel Draw, Textpad, DHTML Menu Builder, CuteFTP, Adobe Acrobat, Ultra-Edit, and the FireFox web browser. The overall site design is based on a template contributed by Haran Sivakumaran of Perth, Australia, at Open Web Design.
Hosting: The site is run and hosted on industry standard open source tools. Specifically, the Apache web server, MySQL database, PERL and PHP, all running on the Linux operating system.