Below you will find information regarding the design & development of the site.
Please note that when building this I opted for ease of development, speed and simplicity.
Version 1.0
This is the first version of the site. I started writing code on January 13th, 2009 and rolled out on March 10th, 2009. I spent about 6 hours a day on it mostly Mondays thru Fridays.
Web Infrastructure
The site was built using ASP 3.0. Yep, a decade old technology. While I am familiar with ASP.Net I decided on 3.0 just because I'm much more comfortable with it.
I use CSS for the layout and believe I stayed pretty honest in keeping content and style separate. In addition, there is quite a bit of client side JavaScript throughout the site.
Database
The underlying database is Access 2003. Ideally, I'd be using SQL Server or other top flight DBs, but Access is cheaper to implement on most hosting platforms.
About the Charts
I'm a big believer in graphical presentation of data. I think it's a lot easier to spot trends than looking at rows and rows of tabular data.
The charts are created with OWC 11 which stands for Microsoft Office Web Components v. 11. It's a very slick set of instructions that use the same code as Excel, Access & Powerpoint.
I've been using the technology for well over 7 years and must say it's unwieldy and poorly documented, but very powerful once you get past the learning curve.
