About the correctly named Hoya website


This site was designed for gardeners who love flowering vines of the genus Hoya. The majority of admirers of this genus (with an internet connection) currently appear to live in the United States, Sweden and England, but I recently found a few websites with Hoyas in German and French. It is hard for Hoya growers to be sure that the plants they have are correctly identified and to decide which plants they want to grown because color photos with correct species identification are hard to find. Unless one belongs to a Hoya society, color photos of blossoms are quite rare in general gargening publications, although they are becoming more common on the web.

Because the site is quite large, and the users will want to either save the images to their hard disks, or print them out, I wanted to design a site that would load quickly, be easy to navigate, and easy to print without the viewers having to understand how frames work. I didn't want people to get stuck in a loop, having to look at a bunch of photos they didn't want to see to get to the one they did, because often they will want to look up a few species listed in the catalog that came in today's mail. At other times, they will glance quickly thru the thumbnails, looking only at the larger pictures of the flowers that look similar to the plant on their patio that is blooming for the first time, to find out its name.

While I could have loaded the pages up with textured backgrounds, labels on the buttons, and done fancy things in JavaScript, that wasn't right for this site. Our viewers want good Hoya photos, with plant information and I didn't want to waste their time. Internet time for our viewers in Europe especially is very expensive, and they often pay for telephone time as well.

This site is still in progress, and more species will be added.

Information provided by Christine M. Burton and Jim Broton. Scanning by Christine M. Burton and Karen Hedlund. Photographs by Tanya Balcar, Joyce Blumenstock, Jim Broton, Christine M. Burton, Karen Hedlund, Jacqueline Langford, Sally Marz, Michael Miyashiro, Angelika Richter, Jim Sanders, George Slusser, R. W. Stewart and Ellen Zachos.

For questions or comments about the website, please email Karen Hedlund, website designer.

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