If you have any problems, questions, or suggestions for this web site, then please contact us.

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Many problems can be corrected by reloading the page components from the server (ctrl-F5).

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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 7, Firefox 3, Chrome, etc)

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• 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, we 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? Our solution is “Progressive Enhancement”—providing a static version of the basic content as quickly as possible, and later enhancing the behavior of the content when the browser supports Javascript and XMLHttpRequest.
  • Computer monitor resolution: we have tried to create elastic page layouts that support minimal 1024 x 768 pixel screens without horizontal scrolling and that expand to exploit larger viewports.

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• 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. We recently modified the webserver to support gzip compression of html, css, javascript, and xml files. Tests show ~ 60% savings in bandwidth and page loading time. Currently, the preferred browsers would include Internet Explorer 7+, Safari 3+, Mozilla Firefox 3.0+, Google Chrome, 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.

  To download the more recent version of any of these browsers, visit Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Microsoft Internet Explorer, or Safari.

  

  

• 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.

• Special browser plug-ins to experience the site:

  The music player requires the Adobe/Flash browser plug-in v7+.

• 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.

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We have designed the site to support a minimal computer screen resolution of 1024 x 768 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 6 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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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.

You may improve page loading performance by modifying your browser settings to enable HTTP pipelining. 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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"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple." Oscar Wilde

The following statistics have been gathered for our site.

Connection Speed

Unknown	34.0%
Cable	29.3%
DSL	19.3%
T1	11.2%
Dialup	4.6%
OC3	1.5%
ISDN	0.2%

Javascript Support

Enabled	98.9%
Disabled	1.1%

Display Resolution

Higher	54.6%
1024 x 768	39.0%
800 x 600	6.4%

Browser

Internet Explorer	68.3%
FireFox	34%
Safari	9.3%

Operating System

Windows	85.5%
MacIntosh	12.8%

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V2 Released 21 October, 2006

V2.1 Released January, 2009

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