Scenic Color Country (SCC) General information & Viewing Notes

Overview:  An SCC site opens with a home page with info (its story?), provides a photo gallery to view its photos individually, and auto-shows to display the photos in an automated slide show.  Pages have variable-width content that flows to the width of the viewer's browser, with photo windows that adjust to the screen resolution to display large photos on the viewer's screen regardless of its resolution.  Pages are optimized for a 1,200+ x 900px window (most pages should appear without scroll bars), but should look ok with scroll bars in any size window 1,024 x 768px and larger.

Conventions - highlight, popup, and underline:  Move the mouse over highlighted text to open an information box with more information, a definition, an explanation, or to display a photo.  Underlined text opens a new window.  Underlined highlighted text opens an information box with an option to open a new window for more information or to display a photo.  (Select the highlights/underlines above as examples.)  When an information box cannot be aesthetically located near their highlight, they appear on top of the page title or in the upper-left corner of the page. The historic Navajo Bridge is now a pedestrian walkway with a spectacular view of the Colorado 467' below in Marble Canyon - click to view its photo

Photo loading and network connection:  Scenic Color Country is all about large photos that are intended to appear instantly when selected.  To counter the delay while a photo paints into the page, photos pre-load while our visitor is perusing the article's home/information page (a downloading note often appears in the page's bottom-left corner or status bar).  A photo selected from a large gallery may take extra time to appear if the gallery has not finished loading. 10Mb+ DSL or broadband is recommended; slower connections may take extra time for pages to load.

Cycling banners and auto-shows:  We are annoyed when cycling images or text fly by so fast that we cannot get a grasp on them.  Our cycling photos are not that fast (about 7 seconds).  Faint control buttons are in the upper-right corner of auto-shows that are active and will light up on a mouse-over.  To view the photos manually, select the pause button, and use the prev and next buttons to cycle through the photos; the resume (play) button restarts the cycle with the next-in-line image, the exit button stops the show and closes the window.  The first photo may linger a couple of seconds before the cycle begins, and an auto-show may look weird for a second or two if it has not finished loading.

Encryption:  There is no sensitive data on SCC but we have joined the effort to make the internet a safer place by encrypting all routes to SCC (shortcut SCCnet.net, ScenicColorCountry.com, and ScenicColorCountry.net).  Our encryption certificate is provided by DigiCert - DigiCert is a leader in internet security and their SSL Certificates have the highest encryption level & superior support.

Known issues:  Mouse-over images in pages with cycling banners (like the walking crane in Colorado River Canyons) will not fully appear until after the first banner transition.  In some browsers (particularly older versions of Internet Explorer) the border on auto-shows may not expand to the full height of the window.  Internet Explorer 7 & 8 have issues with pdf documents and videos unless applications have been added to handle them, and some alignment issues may not get fixed.  (Yeah, we still support these 10+ years old technologies - why, we know not - but not forever.)