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Saratoga High students help design website for local sheriff's substation
By Rebecca Ray
A patrol car that blew up a bad guy's car was a bit much for sheriff's deputy Kevin Greig, so the students who designed the computer graphic toned it down a bit. Now the patrol car pulls in the bad guy's car with a beam.
The three Saratoga High School freshmen who designed the graphic, Jeff Arnold, James Nguyen and Albert Wang, created it for the website run by the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office Westside Substation. For the past two years, Barbara Reeder, the web design teacher at Saratoga High, has chosen students in her class to modify the site, which Greig created 2 1/2 years ago.
Last year, students Bradley Block and Clara Yang, who were then seniors, designed the site. Arnold, Nguyen and Wang created the graphic of the patrol car by adding pictures to the one Block and Yang had on the site last year.
The freshmen also created alterable frames within the document and added an animated rotating sheriff's star. They changed the font, coloring and background. Improvements on some of the graphics made the 12-page site more usable and attractive to the public, said Greig. In addition, Arnold, Nguyen and Wang added photos of the substation to the main page.
"It's much cleaner than it was before and much easier for people to read," Greig said.
The students added a Powerpoint demonstration that Deputy Noah Brommeland created about Internet safety. The demonstration tells children how they can be safe when they chat on the Internet and why they should be safe.
Recently, the substation subscribed for wireless Internet service from Sprint Broadband. Substation personnel decided to attach the Broadband dish to the substation roof because Saratoga was too far from a Digital Subscriber Line center for the substation to get good DSL service.
The wireless Internet service enabled deputies at the substation to connect to an email network for the first time. Residents can now email deputies directly by clicking on their names on the webpage. Before, Greig would receive messages for all deputies at his Hotmail account, would print them out and stick them in the deputies' boxes. Now, deputies have more direct contact with residents and can respond to their messages more quickly.
Sergeants have laptop computers and portable scanners in their patrol cars for gathering data and processing evidence. The wireless Internet service allows for speedier transmission of information between the crime scene and the substation.
The sheriff's Westside Substation website, designed by Jeff Arnold, James Nguyen and Albert Wang, can be found at www.santaclarasheriffwest.org.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
