This website was built in quite a different way from our other travel sites, which were concocted on a PC with a Web editor that combined WYSIWYG and direct code editing. Since late summer of 2008, I've been working with an Apple IMac and RapidWeaver, a theme-based editor in which you build each page, one at a time, into a big file, apply and tweak a theme, and publish the file to the Web, at which time RapidWeaver writes the code. Learning to work in this way took quite some time, but RapidWeaver is the center of a large and wonderfully helpful community, whose members were always willing to help me climb out of the holes I kept falling into.

Here are some of the web developers whose themes, plugins, and utilities I took advantage of in building the site:

Blue Ball Design, whose Blue Ball Tabs Pro is the theme I used for all the site's main and background text pages

RealMac Software, the maker of RapidWeaver, also creates themes, many of which come free with the program. I used one these, Magnesium, on all photo gallery pages (and a few other pages as well, recognizable by their black background).

YourHead Software produces plugin programs that make it easy to create pages with special capabilities. I used Accordion for menus that open and close, Blocks for pages (like this one) that needed to be specially laid out, and Stacks for pages that needed not only a special layout but could do other tricks as well. (The Why and How and Geography Lab pages are examples.)

ElStacko Software makes plugins that collaborate with YourHead's Stacks. Their Exposer Pro is what makes text and graphics appear and disappear on the two Stacks pages I mentioned as examples. (The proprietor excuses the company's name on the grounds that all the good names were taken.)

Rapidweaver Plugs is the builder of Partitions, the plugin program I used to make the photo gallery pages. (RapidWeaver's Magnesium theme is responsible for the fonts and colors; I used Partitions to construct the grid layout for the photo thumbnails.)

Loghound Software's utility PlusKit is what makes the "lightbox effect" work on photos throughout the site.

There were others as well, whom I apologize for leaving out. The great thing is that most of these companies (apart from RealMac Software) are one- or two-person operations, and I never asked any of them a question without getting help that was both fast and effective.

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Credits