A Personal Look at Building a Web Site.
By
Jerry & Marsha De Angelis
One of the most frustrating aspects of perusing bookstores, both on and off the Internet is finding a myriad of new cooking and baking books with little new to offer. This is especially true in the area in which we are most interested -- Italian foods and breads. Some are well-written and often quite beautiful to look at, and a few offer new approaches to food and breads. In the past, we would come home from these book buying trips, or unpack books ordered on the Internet, and spend hours reading them. We would try to remember the best parts so we could refer to them in the future. Unfortunately, it was always easy to remember the worst parts. This process of buying books and maintaining our library has resulted in a collection of about 550 cookbooks. Fortunately one of our other interests is woodworking, so periodic additions to our bookcase collection paralleled the growth of the book collection.
We teach cooking and baking classes as well as maintain a ferocious interest in the cultural integrity of all things Italian. It is this last point on which we have spent countless hours attempting to impress upon those who would listen the importance of authenticity. It is very easy to find thousands of Italian cookbooks that claim to offer authentic recipes, but not quite so easy to find recipes for rustic Italian breads. As we honed our skills and our knowledge of regional Italian foods continued to increase, it became increasingly frustrating to look at what the marketplace offered to an often-unsuspecting public.
We have had the good fortune to be able to travel to Italy at least once each year for 25-27 years. During that time, we have eaten and prepared foods and breads which bear little resemblance to the "authentic" Italian food served in restaurants in the United States, or described in Italian cookbooks. We considered writing a book that would chronicle our experiences and present our ideas, while at the same time clearly defining classical, authentic and creative as they relate to Italian cooking. After thinking about the process and the time it would take, i.e. treatments, proposals, agents etc, we gave up that idea as more bother than it was worth.
About this same time we had the good fortune to meet Gary Holleman. [Note: Gary passed away in October, 1997.] Actually, we never had the opportunity to meet Gary himself, but rather his e-mail persona. We had read about Gary in Food Arts magazine during 1996. We took a look at what was then the Van Nostrand Rheinhold (VNR) site and sent an e-mail to Gary asking why Food Arts and the site gave so little attention to artisan bread. Gary responded that he was not involved in editorial decisions at Food Arts, but would love to see a web page on artisan bread. He asked if we would like to develop such a page with his help. His response was somewhat of a shock, because it had never occurred to us to develop a web page. Co-incidentally, we were becoming interested in the Internet, and the options for worldwide communications it offered. Gary's suggestions were very timely. As the three of us discussed ideas, we asked his opinion of a web site devoted to Italian foods, breads and commentary. We knew from Gary's own works that he was very computer literate, and could comment with sagacity about the subject.
We continued correspondence with Gary regarding the content of the proposed site. Gary also told an editor at VNR about us. She was interested in a book for chefs with bread recipes. We were more interested in a book about Italian bread and food: a book that would discuss cooking authentic Italian food, and provide information and references about such topics as curing olives and salting cod at home. We also wanted to teach readers how to go about duplicating and formulating recipes for Italian style regional breads. Her opinions punctuated our desire to do something that we wanted to do rather than something an editor wanted.
Gary encouraged us to pursue our ideas and to keep him informed of our progress. Presenting food recipes was the relatively easy part as we had been doing that for a number of years, and had a fairly large collection in our database. Presenting breads properly was another thing altogether. Doing so meant translating a number of texts and manuscripts from Italian into English. Additionally, we knew almost nothing about HTML, Java, and JavaScript. Nor did we know how to identify and contract with an Internet Service Provider (ISP), or how to transfer files to and from what seemed then a mythical computer in the internet sky using something called File Transfer Protocols (FTP's).
Notwithstanding all of these issues we decided to proceed and set about to learn what we needed to know. It was all pretty mysterious at the time, but we managed to learn quite a bit and find a company to host our web site. Earthlink served as our original ISP provider. Our current host is HostPro.
The first version of
The Artisan was pretty basic, and not at all sophisticated in its approach to site development and navigation. It was a beginning. About a month later, thanks largely to Gary, we were awarded The Food and Wine Online Award as Site of the Month. We were very encouraged by this and became even more determined to make our site unique. We wanted it to become a combination of recipes, recipe development, technical support, a research option for serious cooks and bakers and a site that was willing to talk about both good foods and bad foods with equal enthusiasm. This latter point is unique to The Artisan since we have no business, need no business connections and can be as candid as necessary without fear of retaliation from those upon whom we might depend for a livelihood.The Artisan. Ease of use and the depth of the information offered is very important to us as we continue to develop the site. For example, we have been able to respond to the needs of visitors by including a site search engine, a searchable database, and an interactive Baker's Percentage Spreadsheet. Additionally, we established LinkExchange, accounts in order to maintain a "hit" count. The Gif Wizard site has allowed us to reduce images to much more efficient size resulting in faster page loading. An Australian company, Riada, has developed the Java Headline applet seen on The Main Page, and helps visitors see at a glance what's new in the site As we look back at the first version of our site, and compare this to the version currently on the Internet, we cringe. The original code was pretty bad, the images are overly large and grainy, and the navigation cumbersome. The best thing about it was that it worked after a fashion, but definitely needed improvement. We immediately set about writing Version 2.0.
By now, we had become expert at using our scanner, and had become fairly proficient at JavaScript. JavaScript is not the Rosetta Stone, but presented a challenge nevertheless. Fortunately, we had received good feedback about the site from a number of people, and were excited about adding more areas of special and general interest. Another trip to Italy resulted in agreements from friends to send us recipes. Consequently, we were able to increase the type and numbers of recipes posted, and know that recipes sent from Italy were indeed authentic. For Example, from Umbria came Torta sul Testo and from Emilia Romagna came Piadina. A friend from Puglia sent Tiella recipes, and friends in Siena researched Schiaciatta, and now 5 recipes for that wonderful bread are on the site.
A second prize for the site was awarded to us from "World in Your Kitchen", an America OnLine affiliate. During this same time, Claudio's Corner was added to The Artisan. This is a special section of the site devoted to the recipes of Claudio Cantore, a third generation professional Italian baker who operates a family bakery in Monterey County, California. We also developed a special section for Restaurant Reviews.
From a more technical and interactive standpoint, we were very proud of a number of areas that have now become standard aspects of
All of this was accomplished while adding to the recipe database, and developing the version of the site currently available to those who visit. Developing a web site together has been a wonderful experience intellectually and personally. We had worked together for 20 years in a totally different field, and knew how to develop a functioning team. This new endeavor was different because it involved areas neither of us had ever explored, and required more trust and interdependency than ever. Our experience in operating a business made self imposed deadlines easy to deal with, but there was no one with whom to brainstorm. It was similar to being back in college…a long time ago experience…and working out problems with other students. After a while we naturally divided the tasks into those areas each was most interested in, and pursued those as our missions. Marsha is the bread expert and the task of translating recipes and testing them was hers. Ditto for research relative to ingredients such as flours and leaveners, proofing times and yield, and temperatures. Jerry is a cook and his non-programming time is spent in developing and testing Italian, food recipes. All in all it is a fair division of labor as each of us has the opportunity to eat a lot of good bread and food, and to make suggestions to someone who actually listens.
Developing The Artisan has broadened our international experience and has helped us realize that there are many small groups of people willing to work together in order to communicate quickly and efficiently worldwide. We thank all of them for the products that they have developed, and for the technical support they have provided. The web development community may be spread around the globe, but is a nice neighborhood in which to live.
During this journey, we have also met a lot of nice people in virtual space. Most have been e-mail meetings, we will, unfortunately, never meet those who have been kind enough to send us kudos and criticisms, or those who have requested recipes and research into lost family meals. As people move further from their European roots, maintaining tradition becomes more difficult. It has been wonderful to help in situations where someone is trying to restore a recipe inherited, or remembered, from a loved one.
The Artisan is now an important part of our lives as we continue to try to make is a site for all those interested in the cultural and gustatory aspects of Italian food and breads. It is far from perfect, and needs constant tending, but so do most things worth doing.
During the past few years - 10 actually - we have also become winemakers and farmers. During that time we have made large amounts of wine for others, and a little for ourselves. Three years ago we decided to develop our own label -
De Angelis Wines. We did that, and the acceptance of our wines has been very, very gratifying. We continue to make wines and have grown from producing 335 cases of De Angelis Wine in 2006 to 650 cases in 2009. We will always remain small. In fact when we describe ourselves, we use the work "nano" quite often, i.e. nano winery, nano producer.
San Luis Obispo, Ca.
September 25, 2009