General Help Information
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Contact Us:
If you have any problems, questions, or suggestions for this web site, then please contact us.
Many problems can be corrected by reloading the page files from the server (ctrl-F5).
When reporting a problem, the following technical information may be helpful to us:
- URL of the page and its modification date and time
- Your network connection (dialup or broadband)
- Your computer type: PC or MAC
- Your computer screen resolution
- Your operating system type and version
- Your internet browser and version(IE, Firefox, Netscape, etc)
- Your "User Preference mode" (complete or limited)
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Frequently Asked Questions:
- Why am I experiencing difficulties viewing the map page?
See Google for map support issues.
- Given the wide range of internet browser support, computer configurations, and network configurations how did you
determine your target audience?
During the development of the web site, I selected these design guidelines:
- To implement according to the latest standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium. This rule would maximize the useability of the site now and in the future; also, it would maximize the maintainability of the site. Consequently, the entire site was re-written from scratch without the use of WYSIWYG development tools.
- To support a minimum set of user configuration requirements by developing a basic web site presentation, and then provide additional content and functionality for user systems that supported additional capabilities. Developing the site in this manner was challenging and exciting. How to balance the network performance needs of St Johnian dial-up users with the rich interactive, content experience possible for high-speed broadband users? How to provide rich interactive presentations without excluding clients using old fashion browsers? I created two versions of the site: one lean version of mostly static text for the dialup users and/or restrictive browers, and one rich version for those wanting maps, photos, documents, and illustrations with slide shows, dynamic regions of the screen, etc.
- Computer monitor resolution: I have tried to create elastic page layouts that support minimal 800 x 600 pixel screens without horizontal scrolling and that expand to exploit larger viewports.
- Why am I experiencing difficulties viewing the map page?
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Internet browser requirements:
- Browsers compatatible with this site:
This site works best with modern browsers which render the site pages according to the XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2 standards of the World Wide Web Consortium. Currently, the preferred browsers would include Mozilla Firefox 2.0+ and Opera 9+. Additional advantages of using a preferred browser include support for dynamically resizing of the maps to fit your viewport, and HTTP pipelining to improve page loading performance.
Special efforts were made to support rendering peculiarities of Internet Explorer 6+ and 7.0, Netscape 8+, and Safari 1.2 browsers.
To download a more recent version of any of these browsers, visit Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Microsoft Internet Explorer, or Netscape.
- Cookies:
In order for the user to save his customized user preferences, he must enable saving cookies for this site.
- Additional requirements for supporting interactive behavior:
Javascript must be enabled.
XMLHttpRequest must be enabled. XMLHttpRequest is an asynchronous HTTP request to the server load xml data and to dynamically change regions of an HTML page.If you are using an Internet Explorer browser version 6 or earlier, then you will need to enable ActiveX which implements XMLHttpRequest. For Internet Explorer version 7+ you should use the default "Native Mode XMLHttpRequest" option rather than the ActiveX implementation.
*** WARNING ***: Enabling ActiveX will increase your security risks.
- Special browser plug-ins to experience the site:
None!
- Browser tips: HTTP pipelining.
Mozilla Firefox supports “Http pipelining”, which can greatly improve the time required to load pages from Http 1.1 compliant servers, especially on high latency networks. To enable this feature see http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips.
Opera 9+ supports Http pipelining by default.
Internet Explorer as of version 7.0 does not support Http pipelining.
- Browsers compatatible with this site:
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Computer configuration
We have designed the site to support a minimal computer screen resolution of 800 x 600 pixels without incurring horizontal scrolling. Those with larger resolution screens will enjoy the elastic page layouts which exploit larger viewports. For instance, the map page will dynamically resize the map as the viewport size is changed. Unfortunately, because Internet Explorer fails to properly render the elastic map layout, we chose a fixed map page layout of 1024 x 768 pixels for that browser.
Colors should be set to "True Color" (32 bit).
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Network configuration:
This site is designed to present many maps, photographs, documents, and illustrations. Viewing the site demands the transfer of many data bits to your system. Consequently, it is recommended that you use a high-speed, broadband network to view this site.
For those with dial-up connections we offer a limited text version. You may also improve page loading performance by modifying your browser settings to enable HTTP pipelining and/or to avoid loading image files. You may want to experiment with using the Google Web Accelerator.
Using analytical web tools to compare page-loading-time we found that our home page loaded faster that those of www.VirginIslandsDailyNews.com, www.NYTimes.com, www.WashingtonPost.com, and www.Tradewinds.vi.
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Web Design Parameters
"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple." Oscar Wilde
The following statistics have been gathered for our site.
Connection Speed
Cable/DSL 75.2% Dialup 14.3% Corporate (high speed) 09.5% Unknown 01.0% Javascript Support
Enabled 86.7% Disabled 13.3% Display Resolution
Higher 59.52% 1024 x 768 34.52% 800 x 600 05.95% Lower 0% Browser
Internet Explorer 7.0 17.1% Internet Explorer 6.x 39.0% FireFox 24.8% Safari 14.3% Opera 9.02 03.8% Netscape 8.1.2. 01.0% Operating System
[back to top]WinXP 80.95% Windows 2000 02.38% Win98 01.19% Mac/PPC 13.10% Mac/Intel 02.38% -
Recent Changes
V2 Released 21 October, 2006
- Nov 16, 2006 -- Help page updated with new content and new presentation style.
- Nov 14, 2006 -- Presentation page slide show has been changed to present extra large images in a "bi-modal, lightbox frame".
- Nov 13, 2006 -- Completed changing all page layouts from a fixed format optimized for a 1024 x 768 pixel resolution screen to an more elastic format that supports a minimal 800 x 600 screen without horizontal scrolling and expands to support the increasingly large numbers of much larger screens. Try resizing Map page and see the map area expand/contract (except for Internet Explorer which because of its standards compliance issues must use a fixed layout). Try clicking on a featured Document or Photo Collection item. The enlarged item will be proportional to the size of viewport.
- Nov 10, 2006 -- Resized many images to improve page loading performance.
- Nov 8, 2006 -- Connections page. Added keyword filters (none, people, place, theme) which help to organize the keywords.
- Nov 3, 2006 -- Changed the official email address to avoid spam.

- Oct 30, 2006 -- Button to switch between "Text version" and "Graphical version" has been added to every page.