January 12, 2008

I thought that it would be best of me to explain some things regarding this website to maybe help you in your decision in whether this website qualifies for one your program awards or not. When I had the first initial idea on starting this website back early October of 1998, I spent a lot of time studying the source code of websites that I liked. I have never taken any classes to write HTML or JAVA and have been doing everything by trial and error. I actually signed up for my first webspace on GeoCities (before Yahoo took it over) on October 18, 1998 and put down my first line of code. Yahoo picked it up and listed it in December of 1998.

At the present time, I do not have the time to take any classes. I am a full-time servant evangelist and I spend up to eleven months on the road during my ministry of disaster relief and servant evangelism by bicycle around the United States. It is very rare when I get furlough time like this to do some extensive work on this website. To go through the code for every one of the 1000+ pages to make sure that every line is correct to standards of HTML 3.2 and W3C validation would take thousands of hours that I do not have. I'm lucky enough to have plenty of time to make sure that all of the links are operational and making sure that the copywrite is up to date.

I have written about 98% of the code on this website by hand. I do not use any webpage publishing software like "Frontpage". The only things that I've used to display the code while I write it has been either Notepad or the free version of EditPad Pro. I have used some programs to help me write things like "Metatags" and I have used "pre-written java scripts". I do not have the knowledge of debugging these tags and scripts to make sure that they meet current validation standards.

Even with all of these things in mind, I have won almost 300 awards from 40 countries around the world. Quite a few of the awards were given by professional website design firms. Also, I've been awarded quite a few "Gold" and "Silver" awards along with a "Diamond Award" from AwardSites! rated award programs.

The main emphasis for the past nine years and will always be is the "content" portion of this website. I want to make sure that my message of compassion towards others is current and relivant to what is happening now. If you still feel that after you have read this short message to you, that my website doesn't meet all of the qualifications and standards with winning one of the awards from your program it's fine. It will not hurt my feelings and I will not slink away with my tail between my legs.

I'm not the kind of person who is trying to get as many awards as I can get. One of the reasons, why I have chosen your award program is that I feel that it is one of good character. Your qualifications are not too easy so it is a challenge to meet them. There is some prestige in getting one of the award programs awards. The bottom line is also the fact that getting one of your awards might help me get viewers to my website that probably wouldn't have wanted to visit my website on their own.