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Navigating The Saanich Web Site

This site uses JavaScript for some of its navigation. If your browser does not support this navigation you will be able to get around using the text links at the bottom and left-hand side of each page. There is also a sitemap available. 
 

Help Topics
Cookies
PDF Documents
Printing Pages
Searching the Site
Viewing the Site
Virtual Tours

There are four main areas of the site; Residents, Business and Development, Municipal Hall and Visitors. From the drop-down menus at the top of the page, you can access a number of areas within each of those four sections. Within each section you can also access text links located on the left-hand side of each page.


Searching the Saanich Web Site
To search the Saanich website, click the Search link at the top of each web page. This will take you to the Search page where you can enter your search criteria. A quick search box is available from the home page.


Viewing The Saanich Web Site

This website has been designed to be viewed at a screen resolution of 800x600.

  • Minimum browser requirements for PC users are:
    • Netscape 6.0, Internet Explorer 5.5, and Firefox 1.0.4. 
    • Some web applications require newer versions to work properly.
  • For MAC the minimum requirements are:
    • For Mac OS 9: Wamcom version 2003-07-23, or Netscape 7.02
    • For Mac OS X: Safari 1.2, Mozilla 1.6, or Netscape 7.1 , Internet Explorer 5.2 is funtional but currently not advised.


Printing Pages

Web pages on the Saanich web site will print without graphics or navigation. Simply print the page from your browser. The page will automatically be formatted for the printer.


PDF Documents
Some documents on our web site are in Portable Document Format (PDF), and require Adobe Reader (a file viewer) in order to read the document.  If you do not have this viewer installed, you may download it for free from the Adobe website.

If you find yourself viewing a blank white screen after clicking on a PDF file link try using the 'refresh' or 'reload' command. (Using the browser menu go to View->Refresh/Reload, or use the icon beside the stop button on the toolbar). Alternatively, you may need to upgrade your version of Adobe Reader.

Some of our PDF documents are very large but they have all been web-enabled, which means that you will receive the first page of a document while the rest of it continues to download in the background. This ensures that you, the reader, have something to view while you are waiting.

There are several factors which affect the download time of documents, bottlenecks can occur for many reasons in cyberspace and the speed of the response time is determined by the weakest link in the chain from the hosting server (where the web site lives) to your browser. Some of them are:

  • the time of day, peak hours are usually evenings where there are more local users on the internet,
  • the user's browser and computer speed,
  • the user's connection speed to the internet (eg. Dial-up vs Cable or ADSL),
  • the number of 'nodes' that the data has to travel through to get from the hosting server to the user's browser,
  • the speed of the server hosting the web site and the speed of that server's connection to the internet.
Examples of Connection Speeds to the Internet
Speed 100 KB web page 1 MB file 5 MB file
56.6 kbps Dial-up Modem 18-20 seconds 3 minutes 14-16 minutes
512 kbps Cable Modem 1.6-2 seconds 18-20 seconds 1-2 minutes
1 mbps ADSL < 1 second 10-15 seconds 45-60 seconds

 

Cookies
Some areas of our web site use cookies, for example GIS and the Community Calendar (if you login). Cookies are used in these instances to track the users requests or recognize their login information.  You have multiple options to deal with cookies on our site:

  • you can set your overall internet security to Medium High, or
  • if your internet security settings are High you can use the 'Advanced' tab to override cookies and 'always allow session cookies' while still blocking other cookies, or
  • if your internet security settings are High you can use the 'Edit Web Sites' option to add this web site and 'Allow' cookies for www.saanich.ca


Virtual Tours
Our virtual tours use Java Applets, which must be enabled in your browser settings, and a pop-up window.  You may have to disable pop-up ad blocking software to use this feature.

Navigation buttons and
their meaning:
Restart the tour icon  Restart the tour
Turn tot he left icon  Turn to the left
Pause tour icon  Pause tour
Turn to the left icon  Turn to the right
Help page icon  Help page


RESIDENTS | BUSINESS | MUNICIPAL HALL | VISITORS

 

Copyright 2007 © The Corporation of the District of Saanich - All rights reserved.