It all started in December 1996 when I forgot to turn in the songbook from Christmas caroling! In the front was a little blurb on the goals of the Starlite Carolers, so I decided to type it in my laptop and try to jazz it up. One thing led to another, like how to create a "starry" background, which I made up, complete with spiral galaxies, globular clusters and an occasional comet. By this time the idea for finally putting it on a web page for Saint Catherine caught on (after all, I was already putting links together for educational resources to help with the Technology committee), so it grew from there.
The content actually came from readily-available sources: Information about the parish itself was copied from a wall calendar we had from last year. Information about the school came from the school's New Parent Information pamphlet and the Parent's Handbook. The Activities information was gathered from the little leaflets that the pupils bring home for the parents to read, as was the information on the Outreach Concert. I already explained the part about the Starlite Carolers.
Most of this was originally typed in SimpleText on a PowerBook Duo 230 laptop in the family room. Later the files were transferred to a Power Macintosh 7100/66 upstairs.
Links to other churches and services in the community were courtesy of an Alta Vista search.
Graphics elements came from a variety of places. One background texture was part of the WebMorsels sampler by Image Club Graphics in Canada, the Starlite Carolers background was made from scratch with ClarisWorks, and the parchment background you see here was originally from an example web page included with PageMill but retouched with ClarisWorks. The actual image of the Pleiades constellation is courtesy of the file archives at the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group.
The Saint Catherine banner was created using the Macedon Caps font and antialiased with SmoothType before being converted to GIF with GIFConverter.
Assembling all the elements was pretty much a drag-and-drop operation using Adobe PageMill, though BBEdit was also used for fine-tuning the HTML code and correcting some of the links. Files were uploaded to a Unix shell account at the ISP with Microphone, a generic telecom program, and tweaked with vi (a Unix text editor) once it was there for last-minute details. I keep the entire web site mirrored on a floppy and a second computer (a Macintosh Quadra 840av which is the webserver at work), synchronizing the files with PowerMerge.
This all took place in one evening. And most of that time was doodling the star background and deciding on patterns for the other backgrounds! Typing in the content took less time, and the actual compositing took the least time. The next evening I did a little more tweaking, like adding some horizontal rules here and there, tightening up some prose, or adding a link, but that was it!
Subsequent updates basically took no more time than would be spent on a word processor.