How We Run our Site
Summary: We use simple, fast-loading pages and minimal graphics to speed downloads. Our site serves
up helmet info to nearly a million visitors each year. We are secured by Comodo (Sectigo) certification and all
connections are encrypted.
Web Design
This is an information site. Our primary goal here is accessibility for those with any browser or
connection speed. We optimize our page design for that. We do not use graphical pages, Java and the enhanced html
functions on our site unless we can confirm that the design will not be slower and will still look reasonable on a
variety of browsers. We browse other sites with scripts, Java, Flash and Active-X turned off for malware protection, and
assume our viewers may as well. Some even have graphics turned off for quicker downloads when they use slow connections, so we have text tags for every image. And many browse from alternative platforms like phones or tablets.
In short, we refuse to write off anybody who wants helmet info!
Since many people who want helmet info still have slow connections, we keep our pages lean by using CSS and a very plain html style, letting your browser do the formatting work. We keep our graphics intentionally lean to make our pages load faster, and total graphic load is only about 4 per cent of the bytes our server sends. Each of our pages sets up the locations of the graphics files when the initial
text file downloads so that you can read text immediately on a slow link while the graphics are still filling in. Nothing
on this site will ever blink, scroll, flash or jump, and we will never use popups. We won't ask you to subscribe to our newsletter or to take a "survey." We never use cookies. We don't disable any browser function to keep you from backing out when you want to. If we move or remove a page we ensure a persistent link by providing a referral page
like this one or a server-side referral, so if you want to link to our pages you can be sure the link will still work years from now.
We have a TTL/SSL secure certificate for our server, so all connections are encrypted and you can be
sure nobody has hijacked us. Our
donations are handled through PayPal, again on secure
connections.
No Tweets, No Faces
We do not find social networking systems useful to put helmet info in your
hands when you need it. The overhead involved in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social networking is substantial, and we are
not willing to spend our precious volunteer time that way.
Our Graphics
Our shopping bag and shopping cart graphics are copyrighted by the artist, Nancy Olds. The
illustration on our children's pamphlet is also copyrighted by the artist, Keri Caffrey. But feel free to duplicate the
pamphlets that include them for any non-profit use. You can use our copyrighted BHSI logo on web pages next to links to
us, as we have used logos from other sites on our links page.
Visitors
Here are
some stats on our website. Although the numbers are out of date, we are serving nearly three million pages
to nearly a million visitors each year. Those visitors are actively looking for helmet info, not just passively receiving
something we hand them on paper.
Privacy Policy
We have a
page explaining our Privacy Policy. In short, we don't collect
info on you. Your numerical machine address is identified in the standard server log of ip requests, but we don't ask for anything
more from your browser. We don't send you anything unless you request it, and don't share any email addresses with
anybody for any reason. We will never give your address to a spammer, although spammers may
send a
bogus message that appears to come from here by spoofing our publicly posted info address. You can always
contribute to support our work, but we don't send appeals out asking you to, because we keep our
budget low and enough of you do make donations without filling your inbox with appeals.
Our Office Link to the Internet
From 1995 to 2001 our Ethernet network here at BHSI was hard-wired to the
Internet with a permanent connection to Performance Systems International (PSI Net--gone but not forgotten). In 2000 we
upgraded our POTS line to a DSL link. We moved to Atlantech in May, 2001. We now have a fiber optic link with
Verizon.
Our website server
For the first six years we ran our own website on our office LAN, but in 2001 we moved the hosting of our web page to
Pair Networks. They have a very large server farm in Pittsburgh, PA, hosting more than 180,000 websites. They are connected to multiple Internet backbones, and have power backup and all the other features needed to be ultra reliable. We find their user interface very well developed and easy to use. Their
prices are low, but they have been profitable since 1995. Download speed has been very good, reliability is tops, and we
are pleased with Pair. We used our network Watcher workstation to monitor some of those sites every three minutes for
about three months before deciding to go with them. We continued to monitor our server and two others with the same
monitor software for about a decade. Dropouts were rare, never longer than 10 to 12 minutes and generally associated with a reboot of the server, sometimes for a system upgrade. We now use UptimeRobot, and that service is reporting 100% uptime. We finally moved our SMTP mail service to Pair in 2006, completing the shutdown of
servers here on the office network. In 2017 we added a secure TLS/SSL certificate for our site, so all connections are secure and encrypted. We upgraded to Enhanced Certificate encryption in 2019.
Our Domain Names
We run two domains for our web page and email: bhsi.org was our original, and we added
helmets.org as well, since people had a hard time remembering our initials. If you connect with bhsi.org we redirect you
to helmets.org. Both addresses call up the same files from the same physical machine. Unfortunately, there are .com and
.net domains for both of our .org domain names, and several other similar names as well. Many of them seem to be serving
up ads. As search engines became popular, domain names became much less critical than they used to be, and the key to
finding us now is having our page at the top of the Google list for a
"bike helmet" search, but the commercial sites are
crowding us way down the list.
Search
The search function for our site is handled for us by Google. We are pleased with their service.
Feedback and Suggestions
We love to get
feedback by email if you have ideas on our page
design that would not involve bulking up with graphics and slowing downloads for people on narrow band modem connections.
And if you want to volunteer like us and donate those ideas rather than be paid for them. We are genuinely pleased to be
informed of problems on our site--something you found unclear, a typo, a bad link, or whatever.