This web site is currently hosted by Burlee.
This web site was, at first, developed using Hot Dog Pro. Later, I used Netscape Composer for some basic text editing. For a while, I did most of the work on it using ... Notepad. :)  I'm now mostly using Microsoft InterDev due to its integration with ASP (Active Server Pages).

I have experimented with several types of navigation methods. The first, created using Hot Dog, was a simple two-frame setup with "navigation buttons" in a vertical frame on the left.

The second navigation method I tried was a pretty fancy JavaScript "expanding folder." I thought this one was pretty cool, but I decided not to keep it because it was rather complicated to maintain and not as flexible as I would have liked.

The third one I tried used JavaScript onMouseOver to display a "menu" picture when the mouse was over a designated "menu title" picture. This technique uses images (GIFs, JPEGs) in conjuction with image maps to provide feedback to the user. The big disadvantage to this method is the use of GIFs or JPEGs: They take longer to load. Another problem was getting strange and different behavior from Netscape and IE.

Then I experimented a little bit with something called Image Map Rollovers which are a combination of JavaScript, Image Maps and Cascading Style Sheets. Essentially, this is DHTML. However, cross-browser DHTML is difficult. Because Netscape 4.x and Internet Explorer 4.x seem to have quite different ideas about the way that Style Sheets are implemented, I found it nearly impossible to get this one working decently. I couldn't get Internet Explorer to see the links properly (it seemed to think there was a link within a link and simply ignored the "inner" link. And Netscape had a bad habit of "flickering" the links.

For a long time, I had a DHTML-based meu navigation system. It used JavaScript, some tables and some Cascading Style Sheets. This made download much quicker sine the menu file wass smaller than the collection of images used in previous attempts.

Unfortunately, that method used frames ... until I moved the site to Burlee.com, where I could use Server Side Incldues (SSI).

I now use a combination of SSIs, external JavaScript files and ASP to build each of the pages on the site, making for, I believe, a cleaner, more consistent look and feel.

Making formatting and consistency across pages much, much easier is the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Cascading Style Sheets are truly a blessing to any web developer.

A consideration with older (3.x and below) browsers is the JavaScript. And some people may have JavaScript disabled in their browsers for "security" reasons. But what the heck, this is only a personal web site.

But considering that this is simply a personal web page and is still in its infancy, I am not too concerned about backward compatibility.