We’ve eliminated the broad navigation menu on the left in favor of a simple navigation bar towards the top.  Visitors can more easily find the common points of interest such as pictures, availability, rates, and the ‘contact us’ page.

With our website turning 1 year old recently, it seemed like the SPAM-BOTS found us and a lot of the e-mails we were receiving from the website were actually SPAM.  Because of the increase in SPAM volumes, we’ve added a CAPTCHA field, courtesy of  Carnegie Mellon University, to our ‘contact us’ page.  These days, most of us have come across a CAPTCHA field at some point so we are pretty confident it won’t scare our visitors away.  For those of you that don’t know, CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”.  Of course not everyone that visits our website will know what this is, so we have continued to post our direct e-mail and phone number just in case.  For anyone wondering why they can’t copy and paste or click on the e-mail or phone number, it’s because they are images and not actual typed text.  This is another common technique utilized to hide from SPAM-BOTS.

Aside from the CAPTCHA field we also converted our ‘contact us’ page to use PHP instead of the FPSE.  PHP provides infintely more flexibility, capability, and security over FPSE , but it also required that we learn a new language however cursory our use of that language may be.  Ultimately I see us using more PHP on the website as it grows and evolves as the language is fairly easy to learn and provides a great deal of control over the content.

We hope you enjoy the new website and we look forward to a great 2009.