Les Jones

Travel > Kentucky was great. Melissa and

Kentucky was great. Melissa and Jay and I went to Lexington for the horse race at Keeneland. We spent Sunday at the Shaker village at Pleasant Hill. I'm writing up a trip report on Lexington, so for now I'll just say both places were beautiful. I got lots of pictures, which I'll post when I move the blog to the new site at www.lesjones.com in a few weeks.

I found a web site I built in 1999 for the Cumberland tourism board. The Cumberlands of Tennessee Heritage Trail is a self-guided auto tour of 26 attractions in the Cumberland Plateau region. I couldn't find it with Google, and I realized it was probably defunct. Chris Range suggested a search of the Internet Archive, which I had never used. Sure enough, they had a copy.

I'm still proud of the look and navigation of the site. You can choose areas of interest from a list on the main page, or traverse the entire web site like a slideshow using the Next links. The general navigation scheme was borrowed from Yahoo! There are some navigation buttons at the top, and those are repeated as text links at the bottom of the page: that's an old web design technique that's still useful. Every page has a copyright notice, a link to the home page, a link to the search page, and a link to the contact page.

If I were designing the site today, I wouldn't change much. Instead of the plain blue background I'd probably use a simple striped pattern. I'd definitely make the fonts sans-serif (using a stylesheet, of course). Serif fonts were on the way out even back in 1999, but the only way to reliably change fonts was to use the font tag, which I didn't like. I didn't change 56K.COM to sans-serif until I could do it using a linked stylesheet.