This site is used to provide information about our company to potential clients and as a test bed for our ideas. These are often conflicting goals, since new ideas aren't always good ones.

All Odin Consulting, Inc. pages are generated automatically by inserting different content into a single template page. This has the benefit of producing pages with a consistent look. It makes navigation easier, because the main navigation controls are always in the same place and look the same.

Using an automated process is beneficial for more reasons than just to maintain a consistent look and feel. It helps a lot for maintenance. There will never be broken link within our site because the links are generated by the same process that generates the pages.

The negatives of an automated web page generation process are mostly problems with fitting square pegs into round holes. Not all content should be presented the same way. As our site grows, we'll be migrating to a system where pages are grouped into related sets. Each set will have its own common template file. All pages in a set will share this common template file, and thus have a common look and feel.

DESTINATIONS       Home       Products Web Navigation Calendar View Future Plans

The problem "square peg going into a round hole" is demonstrated by visiting one of the detail pages for our products or services. You'll notice that the main navigation menu goes away and is replaced by a navigation menu like that on the right with links for the detail pages plus "Home" and "Up" links.

This quirk is an artifact of our current automated web generation process, which wasn't designed for nesting.

We'll be preparing a new version some day that fixes these problems and allows deeper nesting along with a nicer navigation system based on Javascript or Java; while maintaining a good navigation system for users without these features.