Maureen Boling, Bruce Frazier and Alan Busacca created the soil map. Richard Rupp developed the web version. Their map was digitized by the Spokane Office of the NRCS, and provided as an ArcInfo^Ó export file. This file was brought into ArcViewÓ where county boundaries, cities and color were added. This state map was exported as a bitmap, converted to a GIF file with Microsoft Image Composer^Ó , and is used on the initial page of the website. Soils in individual or groups of counties were selected from the original soil map in ArcView^Ó . The county soil maps were exported as bitmaps to Microsoft Paint^Ó to be colored, and then converted to GIF files as above.

The descriptive characteristics were put into a Microsoft Access^Ó database that was imported into ArcViewÓ and joined to the map database. The joined database was exported as a DBF file, passed through Microsoft ExcelÓ to solve a file compatibility problem, and imported into Access^Ó. The database was reduced in size from one record for each soil polygon to one record for each soil legend category. Individual reports were created for each soil legend category and converted into HTML files.

The webpages were assembled using Microsoft FrontPage98^Ó. The county soil map GIF images were placed on a page and drawing a polygon around an individual map unit created client-side image maps. Where one soil map unit was embedded in the middle of another, the surrounding map unit was split into two or more polygons. The targets for the image map polygons were assigned to the soil description files. Finally, the soil series examples in the soil description files were hyperlinked to their detailed descriptions in the Soil Series Classification database maintained on the web at Iowa State University.