About Using The Elder-Gateway Web Site

We have done a lot of thinking on designing our web site so that you would find it easy and efficient to use and to find out information about senior citizens and baby boomers.

Many web sites have good features that allow visitors to more easily use their web sites, but we suspect that many visitors are not aware of all their possibilities.

Here are major elements you should be aware:

Main Page Links At The Top

Across the top of each page are the main page links for this site. There is a drop down list of sub-pages for each link that has them so that you may easily go to one of those pages. These pages include:

• Home: The main page of the Elder-Gateway web site.
• About: About Elder-Gateway, its founder, its editors, and the Elder-Gateway web site.
• White Papers: Check here for Elder-Gateway papers on special topics of interest to boomers and seniors.
• Reviews: Here you can find reviews of products and services relevant to senior citizens and baby boomers. You will get our honest opinion here.
• New: Check here for our blog portion of the Elder-Gateway web site for posts of what is new and of interest to boomers and seniors.
• Subscribe: We offer several mailing lists with topics relevant to baby boomers and senior citizens, from health, medical, diet, finance, hobbies, and self-employment.

Note: You will find links at the top and bottom of every page.

Page Links At The Bottom

At the bottom of every page you will find additional links to pages that are useful but you may not always need. These include:

• Contact: We use a nice contact form to make it easy for you to contact us by email.
• Privacy: Your information is important to us. We treat you the way we would like to be treated. This page has our complete privacy policy. Please read it to ensure your understanding of what you should expect from us.
• Terms: Please read this page to understand the terms and conditions of using Elder-Gateway and the information we provide.
• Site Map: This page provides a convenient clickable list of all pages on Elder-Gateway. Please use this page if you want to get the whole picture of what the Elder-Gateway web site offers you.

Text Size Readability Links At The Top Right

You can change text size on any page in any major browser by using your – and + keys on a Windows PC or – and + keys on a Mac. I can change text size in my FireFox browser by using my mouse’s scroll wheel. You knew that, right? Well, maybe not. It depends on whether you knew it once and how often you used this knowledge. The text size buttons make it easy to adjust a page for better readability.

Here is an easy way to change text size at the Elder-Gateway web site. You can click on the “A+” icon to make text larger and the “a-” icon to make text smaller. You can also click on the “Default” icon here to return to our normal size text.

By the way, we researched what size text would make for good reading on an information site such as ours. You should find it easy to read our web site. We use a non-serif, simpler font for headlines which are in larger sizes. We use a serif font for body text because serif fonts are easier to read for most people in the smaller sizes.

Bread Crumb Trail Under The Logo

A bread crumb trail of links gives you a clickable hierarchy of where you are in a web site and the pages from home that brought you there.

If you are on a sub-sub-page, you can click on any of the pages in your bread crumb trail to return to your previous place.

This makes internal navigation much easier, simpler, and more intuitive.

Sharing, Bookmarking, and Recording Page Content Links

You can find a series of icons just below each page title that are very handy. You can easily share a page on your favorite social networking site by clicking on its icon under each title. Hold you mouse over one and its name will appear. These include:

• Social Networking Sites: You can click one of these to go to some of the better known social networking sites such as Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and others.
  
  You can easily share a page on your favorite social networking site by clicking on its icon under each
  title.
• Bookmark This Page: The purple icon with a star adds a new bookmark of the page you are on to your browser’s bookmarks. This is handy if you don’t remember, or did not know, you can add a new bookmark by using “<control or command> d”.
• PDF This Page: This is a very handy way to make a PDF of a web page and save it for your future use. Of course, it helps if you put it somewhere where you can find it later.We use this more and more to record purchase whether on eBay or any web site so we capture all the information of the sale or offer.This is better than saving a web page to your computer because doing so saves all of the images that go on a web page and usually adds a folder for such things. A PDF is more efficient and has all of the graphics in the PDF, and you can email the PDF very easily.

  Try it. It may change your life.

• Print This Page: This is another handy icon, the one with a printer image. The screen you go to shows you what will print.You have the choice to delete all or specific images. You also can hold your mouse over any paragraph and then delete that text.
  Again, very handy.

  You don’t get all of the clutter of logos, navigation menus, sidebars, and footers. You get to print just the content, which is usually what you want.The page prints with the web site page title and URL at the top and the date and time at the bottom.

• Email This Page: The final icon is an envelope. Clicking on the icon opens your default email client with the page title filled in as the subject and the page URL in the body. You add recipients and edit the subject or body, and you are good to go.

The Sidebar:

The sidebar is the right hand column on the web page. I contains:

• Search The Elder-Gateway Web Site: Just type a word or phrase in the search box and all matching pages show up in the content area. Naturally, all titles are clickable to take you to the page or post.
• New: This is the blog portion of the Elder-Gateway web site where you will find new posts of interest to baby boomers and seniors. This area shows the most recent posts, and each title is clickable. Use the “NEW” tab at the top of the page for all posts.
• Subscribe: You can click here to go to our mailing list page. We offer a variety of lists of interest to senior citizens and baby boomers. You may subscribe to one or more lists.
  We offer a variety of lists of interest to senior citizens and baby boomers. You may subscribe to one or more
  lists.

  Confirmation Email:You will get a confirmation email that you will need to answer. This ensures that the request came from you and you consent to be added to our list. Separate lists means that you will be kept up to date on information in which you are interested. You won’t get email about dieting if you are signed up for a blogging mailing list, for
  example.

  Different Lists: You can sign up for a general mailing list that will keep you posted on new features of interest on our web site or general information of relevance to senior citizens and baby boomers.

• Tag Cloud: Okay, this sounds a bit wonky, but it is very useful nevertheless. Think of it as an index to subjects we cover on this site.Each tag acts as a subject or a topic. The size of the text indicate how many links there are to this word or phrase. Each tag in the cloud is a clickable link to the pages or posts containing that tag. Clicking will bring up a list of all pages or posts, and each title is clickable to the post or page on which it is used.

Tags On Pages And Posts

Speaking of tags, you will find a list of tags we assigned at the bottom of each page. The tags are clickable so you can easily find related pages.

Comments On Pages Or Posts

Most pages or posts will allow you to make comments. If so, there will be a comment box at the bottom.

Comment Approval: Your comment will usually go to us first for approval. When we approve your comment, it will be included on the page.

You add your name and email, and optionally your web site URL. You do not need to register t leave a comment. Then add your comment. Please keep your comment respectful and factual. We accept comments at the G level, not at PG or above.

CAPTCHA: We use reCAPTCHA, a graphic image that acts as a challenge to prove you are human and not a Ceylon bot, You will need to enter the reCAPTCHA phrase shown below the form. Sorry, it is a fact of life today to take precautions.

If you cannot read the reCAPTCHA text, you can click on the small ying-yang-style double arrows for a new one, or click on the speaker with sound icon below it for an audio version. I believe that upper and lower case do not matter on our web site, but it doesn’t hurt to enter the characters upper and lower case, as the case may be (ahem). If you fail, you will get another chance.

Error Pages

We address two types of not found errors, the 404 error on web sites:

• Internal file Not Found: This is rare at our site and derives mostly from external sites having an outdated link to our web site. These will usually clear up in time.In the meantime, we will temporarily redirect at outdated URLs to the new URL, or web page address, as soon as we are aware of them.
• External file Not Found: These are links we have to other sites that have become broken because of changes to the other web site.We will delete these outdated links as soon as we are aware of them.

In both cases, any such error will send an eMail to our webmaster who will then take appropriate action.

We will give you alternative choices so that you can likely find what you are looking for.

Conclusion

In conclusion, you have seen the hidden aspects of our web site that enhance your visit and make your stay more enjoyable. We encourage you to take advantage of them; that’s why they are here.

Tagged as: Baby Boomer, Computer, Confirmation, Diet, eBay, eBook, Erie, Facebook, Interest, Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Jobs, Medical, New, Politics, Privacy, Self-Employment, Senior Citizens, Seniors