Building this website has been quite an "experience".  This is the first website that I have ever created, so it has been a fantastic learning experience, despite how frustrating and/or tedious it sometimes was.  Unfortunately, as is often the case, the best way to learn how to do something the right way is to first do it the wrong way.  I have learned a lot about building web pages, not the least of which is that it takes a lot of time to smooth out all the wrinkles that are encountered along the way.

I constructed my cartographic models using MS Word.  The frustrating aspect was that a lot of my time spent ensuring that everything lined up correctly ended up being a waste because of the way in which some of the lines shifted after being copied into MS Paint.

Copying my Excel data tables into a web page proved to be quite complex, until I realized that there was simple and much more obvious solution.  Excel tables that had been saved as web pages would not display their grids when viewed in Netscape and could not be properly edited using Netscape composer.  In order to put a title and return link on these pages I actually had to learn some basic HTML and edit the source code.  I was able to make the pages satisfactory but there were still things I would have wished to add.  Then I discovered that it is possible to just copy the tables, paste them into Paint and save them as jpegs - more time that ended up being wasted.  Well, at least I learned a few lines of HTML.

Keeping all the links accurate can be quite a task, especially when new pages are added in.  It is critical to name all files logically so that it is easy to link to the right pictures and pages.  Having a mental outline of how a viewer would proceed through the website is important for making sure that all the correct links are included on each page

The editing required to create good images takes a long time - always much longer than you anticipate.  I already knew this but think that it should be emphasized nonetheless.

Once I was ready to publish the entire site, I read in the publishing instructions that UNIX will not recognize file names that had spaces in them.  Luckily only a few of my pages had spaces in their names, but all my cartographic models and backgrounds did.  This meant that I had to take out all the spaces in the file names and go back through every single page to update the links and images.