If you want a team page for the current season, point to the TEAMS menu item. A dropdown list of teams will appear: click on the team you want.

If you want a team page for another season, click on the TEAMS menu item. This takes you to a page which has a list of the teams for the current season, plus a list of hockey seasons near the bottom of the page. Click on the season you want: this will take you to a page with a list of the teams for that season; click on the team you want.

Teams aren’t allowed to have their own, separate team sites: if you want a team site you must first seek special permission from the NCOHA. This webmaster makes team sites for other organizations — see his page Portfolio : Sports Sites for details — and will make a team site for an NCOHA team if (a) permission has been granted, and (b) it is understood that the NCOHA has the final say over the content of the team site. These restrictions are necessary to prevent problems which have occurred in the past with unauthorized team sites.

Teams aren’t allowed to have their own, separate team sites.

Point to the ABOUT US menu item. A dropdown menu will appear, including a menu item Contact Us: click on that menu item, which goes to a page which details the various ways of contacting the association, executives, team staff, or the webmaster.

That character indicates that the menu item goes to a different website.

The contents of the page appear dimly behind the menus, but only with better browsers. This is done because it is sometimes helpful to be able to see a menu without the menu hiding part of the page.

The above examples are from Firefox 3.6, which can produce transparencies, and Internet Explorer 8, which cannot. (The menu items for Firefox 3.6 are also sculpted, another difference between the two browsers, but this is not a difference that has anything to do with transparencies.)

This is an icon you can click on to jump to the top of the page.

You can go to the home page either by clicking the HOME menu item, or by clicking the Predators logo in the page banner. If you use the second method, a predator’s roar will sound if your browser has JavaScript enabled and the Flash add-on installed. And if you use the second method, then bookmark the page, the sound will repeat whenever you go to the page using that bookmark.

If you don't want to hear the sound, just delete any “?roar=yes” at the end of the page’s address.

The site works well with most recent browsers, and all modern browsers, with these exceptions:

• Older Browsers : although the site works with a wide range of browsers, it is less attractive with older browsers, which lack features found in modern browsers. For example, this site tries to make menus semi-transparent so that menus will not completely obscure what is behind them: with older browsers the menus will be completely opaque.

• Internet Explorer 5 and 6 : dropdown menus will not work if JavaScript is disabled. The site will still work, but a bit awkwardly: if you point to a menu item, such as ABOUT US, and a dropdown menu doesn’t appear, you can simply click the menu item, which will take you to a page with the same choices as the dropdown menu. Alternatively, you can enable JavaScript, as described in SPECIAL REPORT : JavaScript.

  Note : the site was fully compatible with Internet Explorer 5 until 2010, however, Microsoft ends support for this browser in 2010, and compatibility can no longer be assured.

• Mobile Browsers : see the FAQ “Can I use a cellphone to browse the site?”.

Pages for older seasons have not been made friendly to mobile browsers. Pages for the 2009/2010 season and later are friendly with sufficiently capable cellphones and other mobile devices. For details, see SPECIAL REPORT : Website Changes for 2010/2011 (Changes Affecting Mobile Browsers).

Your browser lets you configure how large text should normally appear in web pages. This website normally uses the size you configured. Many sites, however, use a size smaller than you configured: if this smaller size had been too small for you, you may have reconfigured your browser to enlarge the text to make the text in those sites more readable; but if you did so, text in sites like this one would therefore appear too large.

This is the size you configured your browser to use.

Text size problems would not exist if all sites sized text alike, but they don’t: many, like this one, use the size you configured; many use a size about one step smaller; and many use a tiny size which is unrelated to how you configured your browser. The text size therefore varies from site to site.

This site’s designer suggests that you configure your browser to use a font size in which this text is easy to read, and in which this text is also easy to read. (The smaller size is often used in menus, sidebars, footnotes, etc., and is similar to the font size used in many sites which don’t honour the font size you configured.) If this makes text too small on other sites, you could use your browser’s zoom function, if it has one, to enlarge the other sites’ text. One hopes that, in the future, zooming will become less needed as more sites correctly honour how you have configured your browser.

When viewing pages on this site, some people may see fairly large blue/gray margins on the left and right of each page. This happens most often for people who have very wide monitors, or who have configured very small fonts.

This happens because this site sizes each page so that the width doesn’t exceed a certain limit. This is done to make pages easier to read: it has been found that people can most easily read lines of text which are neither too wide nor too narrow; by setting a maximum width, the site can ensure that lines of text will not be so wide that they become hard to read.

The maximum width depends on how you have configured your browser’s default text size: if you have configured a large text size, the width is greater; if you have configured a small size, the width is less. The result is that each line will have about the same number of words whether the font size is large or small. But a side-effect is that the margins on the left and right of each page grow as the font size shrinks.

Note: if the browser window is very narrow, or if the font size is very great, the large margins will not appear; pages will take up the full width of the browser window.

Note: the limit to the width of each page isn’t honoured by old versions of Internet Explorer, since these browsers don’t support the feature which allows the width to be limited. For these browsers, pages always take up the full width of the browser window.

This site offers some documents which require programs some people don’t have. Examples of such documents are Adobe Acrobat (.PDF), Microsoft Excel (.XLS), and Microsoft Word (.DOC) documents. If you don’t have the program normally required, however, you can get free programs which will let you view and print those documents. This site has a page telling you how to get free Document Viewers which will enable you to read those documents.

Note : documents offered by sites on the Internet are usually in Adobe Acrobat (.PDF) format, which you can read using the Adobe Reader (often called the Acrobat Reader); if you don’t have this program, you should get it. Caution : Adobe will probably try to trick you into installing more than just the Adobe Reader, so at each step in the installation procedure, be careful to decline installation of other things.

If you print web pages on this site, some things will not be printed, by design. The page banner, borders, background, menus, and decorative items aren’t printed, because they aren’t needed on printed pages. Also, background colours aren’t printed unless there is a very good reason, and text is plain black on white, because this reduces your printer costs, especially if you have an ink-jet printer.

Sometimes background colours and images will not be printed, even when they should be. This is because browsers have an option to disable printing of background colours and images: this can reduce your printer costs, but may also result in printed pages that lack important content or which look bad; for example, if the page has white text on a dark background, and the browser doesn’t print the dark background, the text will not show up. If this happens you can configure your browser to print background colours and images, which will fix this problem. To do so:

• Chrome: there appears to be no way to configure this.
• Firefox: click File, Page Setup, Format & Options, then check the checkbox labelled “Print Background (colors and images)”.
• Internet Explorer: click Tools, Internet Options, Advanced, then check the checkbox labelled “Print background colors and images”.
• Opera: click File, Print options, then check the checkbox labelled Print page background.
• Safari: there appears to be no way to configure this.
• SeaMonkey: click File, Page Setup, Format & Options, then check the checkbox labelled “Print Background (colors and images)”.

Items such as team contact information and team sponsors are missing when the information has not been sent to the webmaster.

Similarly, items such as documents are out of date when more up to date information has not been sent to the webmaster.

This happens when you have tried to go to a page or file which does not exist. This should happen only if you are trying to go to something which has not yet been uploaded to the site, e.g. to the Master Schedule, or to a team calendar for a month which is well in the future.

This is described in SPECIAL REPORT : JavaScript.

These are pages created for authorized NCOHA personel to post information on the site themselves, without involving the webmaster. For example, if it is urgent to post a notice that games are cancelled due to inclement weather, a coach or manager can post the notice, and the notice goes onto the site immediately.

The administrative pages are password protected.

There is no button or link to go to the administrative pages, except for links from Help page’s site map: this is because the few people authorized to use these pages are told by the webmaster where to go, and they will bookmark the pages on their PC(s).

Right now there are administrative functions to post urgent messages, team schedules, and restricted documents. More Details appear in the special report SPECIAL REPORT : Administrative Pages.

This happens when you have failed to enter the correct username and / or password when prompted to do so at a password-protected page or file.

Password protected pages on this site include the administrative pages, discussed above, as well as restricted documents on the ABOUT US : Documents page.