William Holcomb
B.P. 222
Nouakchott, Mauritania

Alison Green
Marijuana Policy Project
P.O. Box 77492
Washington, DC  20013

Dear Ms. Green,

I recieved a message from Daniel Rosenthal November 28th in regards to the Web Administrator position. It asked that I refactor the page at: alt.mpp.org using modern web standards. As I mentioned in my initial cover letter I am currently a volunteer serving in Mauritania and unfortunately I have been on the road for the last week fixing computer centers in preparation for my departure. I didn't actually recieve the mesage until the first and have only today had both electricity and sufficient free time to complete the project. I apologize for its lateness.

The letter from Mr. Rosenthal also included some questions, as follows:

• What design challenges does the home page present? My main issues with the page were twofold. The HTML was outmoted and overly verbose. Also, the column of images on the left I think unnecessarily clutters and dominates the page.
• How did you overcome them? The first was simply a matter of deleting bunches of table tags and adding some CSS. The second I didn't address because I think it would be best solved with a fundamental redesign moving the images off of the frontpage and onto a page devoted to publicity.
• How is your new design superior to the existing page in terms of
  • layout: It doesn't differ significantly. Adhering to the original three column layout was a part of the design specification. There are some borders to create a stronger sense of flow and division, but the only significant changes were to the underlying code.
  • accessibility: The usage of XHTML moves the page much more toward being focused on content rather than display. The layout is basically three column (the header spans the two rightmost columns). It is not the layout made popular by a list apart however. If you look at the sections in the code they are: header, content, banners then publicity whereas on the screen (and using alap's code, the publicity would have come first. For sight-impaired users using a screen reader (which, given the MPP's audience of people with frequently terminal medical problems is likely), this means that they will first get the main content rather than having to sort through the publicity. (I made thi change when considering this question and am currently in a cybercenter where I cannot verify the page's appearance in browsers other than IE6. If there are issues it s this rather than carelessness that is the cause.)
  • usability? Since the content remained essentally the same, usability was not significantly increased. Not knowing the primary use of the site (information for the uninformed versus coordination of workers), I don't have a clear picture of how to alter the site.