The Amateur Radio
Experience
It's about communication.
Each client has a goal for his or her Web site, and this goal is usually encapsulated by a business logo. For amateur radio clients like Scott Prather, this logo is the QSL–or contact confirmation–card.
Contacts are the essence of amateur radio, but the road to achieving diverse and frequent contacts is unique to each operator. In the case of this client, his method of choice for maximizing communications is antenna design and development. Accordingly, in these pages you'll see details about antenna performance testing, antenna modeling, and antenna building.
The presence of sophisticated data required the use of overlays and image animation to permit dynamic in-page display of charts and figures. Where appropriate, we'll add PDF files for users who want to print the data. We'll also include appropriate external links, so users can access further information.
The goal of this site is to share the antenna design expertise, communication achievements, and other activities of Scott Prather in a user friendly and accessible way.
The Construction of n7nb.com
When a Web site is built “freehand” using a blank page to start, the first step in the process is the construction of a wireframe. The wireframe represents the skeleton of the site, and contains all the major layout areas and general descriptions of their content. At Star Rose Arts, we normally present wireframes that represent the general page layout as well as samples of overlay placement. You can see the wireframes for this site by clicking on the wireframe links above.
The next stage of construction is the design composite. These composites are normally Photoshop documents which look very much like the eventual page will look. These composites would normally be saved as straight image files with general descriptions for screen readers to use. However, in these composites, we've taken the step of using real text for the mock article and also to allow all users to be able to access the mock animation. These pages can be viewed using the Comp1 and Comp2 links.
To Blog or Not To Blog?
The presence of a blog on a site sets up the expectation of extremely frequent updates. However, this client's primary interest is communicating by amateur radio and designing antennas—neither of which lends itself to such frequent updates. So we do not anticipate a blog at this time.
Mobile Sites
Although the number of users accessing sites from mobile devices is steadily growing, the client anticipates that the primary method of visiting this site will be the desktop. Our experience suggests that many users are patient about navigating multi-column layouts on mobile devices, so at this time we will design for desktop users while keeping mobile users in mind when building layouts.