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The Piano Education Page Looks Through Time

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About | PEP 20th Anniversary| Piano Education Home

Changes in technology

The Piano Education Page has gone through a number of major changes in look and functionality, particularly as better tools became available for writing HTML code. Some of these are discussed in the article, Piano Education Page 20th Anniversary. Anyone who has done it will tell you that you become very efficient and lean when you have to hand-code your site, as I did in PEP's first couple of versions!

HTML itself has been dramatically extended, along with the corresponding support in browser programs, so that many things are possible now that weren't possible 20 years ago. Probably the most far-reaching of these has been the implementation of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). I was an early adopter of CSS on PEP, hand-coding it into the pages until tools became available that supported it, as its advantages in maintaining a consistent look and feel on a site were all too apparent. The 3-D graphics I created and used on PEP in its early incarnations were also unusual on the web when PEP was started. More recently, the growth in use of mobile devices spurred the addition to PEP of explicit mobile-friendly features.

Perspective

The images below depict the site home page in various Opus numbers (rewrite versions). Each rewrite always included considerable new content and revisions of old content to keep it fresh. Each Opus also included completely new and different layouts for all the Kids pages. I haven't shown the new Kids layouts here. I am the culprit behind all these layouts, so any and all blame attaching to them is mine. Let's take a look at the evolution of the site now.

PEP Home Page Layouts During Its 20 Years Online
Opus 1, No. 1 Written entirely in HTML code 1995	Opus 1, No. 2 Still hand-coded in HTML 1995
Op. 1, No. 3 Tabular main menu, code generated 1996	Op. 2, No. 1 First use of background graphics 1996
Op. 3, No. 1 Background music added 1997	Op. 4, No. 1 New logo, layout 1998
Op. 5, No. 1 More densely packed 1999	Op. 6, No. 1 Redesigned layout 2003
Op. 7, No. 1 New layout, news front and center 2004	Op. 8, No. 1 Simplified home, Presto menus added 2006
Op. 9, No. 1 New logo, color scheme, navigation 2009	Op. 10, No. 1 New logo, program, graphics 2015 - 20th anniversary

About | PEP 20th Anniversary| Piano Education Home