I will be honest; recently, I have been having a hard time coming up with articles to write. Considering that any potential reader on this great website may be using different software, with special techniques and unique personal data building preferences, writing articles that could potentially be interesting to a reader with any combination of these elements is quite challenging. Or maybe its the difference between drinking water in the foothills of Idaho than in the mountains of Arizona. Regardless, I took a step back and looked at what I have written so far in the past fifteen articles. While I certainly enjoyed putting my thoughts and theories down on paper for building heavy highway data, I am certain that this was interesting to only a very few readers. On the other hand, my series of articles on working with contours from the engineer, as far as I can tell, appealed to a much broader spectrum of readers. Since the entire point of writing these articles is to help newcomers to the world of data building, and to assist experienced, old timers refine their data procedures, I wanted to find another subject that could have the same general appeal as the contour series.

After some soul searching, pizza, changing some diapers (not associated with the previously mentioned pizza) and chasing my kids around Boise, I remembered something from my football years long ago. At the beginning of every season, after weeks of seeing how long a human could run before becoming unconscious, we would finally get our pads back and actually get to run plays. Instead of doing exciting, dramatic plays that they show you in the movies, we would practice the most basic running and passing plays possible. Over and over again. For weeks on end. Now that I look back on this, I understand why: if you can not run the simplest play perfectly as a team, you will never be able to effectively run a more complex play. The same applies to data. If you can not build the simplest project quickly, effectively and cleanly then bigger, more involved projects will be a mess onscreen and worse, in the field. For this reason, I am going to devote my next series of articles to the building data for a simple site.

Ah, the simple site. Its where we all started. Its most likely the type of project you would use to train anyone who was looking to build data - I know that's what I did. Its the type of project you build to mentally recover from a 10 mile mess of multilane, multi-subgrade, multi-ramp, metric messiness. Typically speaking, as a general project type, simple sites are consistent in what you have up front and what you are tying to accomplish by the end. Believe it or not, but I think that is why they are called simple sites. In most cases, they can be built very quickly, especially when compared with much larger projects. And most of all, they are the perfect opportunity for both new and old data hands to sharpen their skills.

Now, I know that I have referenced simple sites in a number of my previous articles. However, after the recent contrast of interest between my series on contours and heavy highways, I think that simple sites deserve a series of their own. In doing so, I can spend much more time and give more detail to some of the basic principles of these simple projects. Where do you start? What will you need to start? What should you be immediately concerned with? What are you first objectives? What is your final goal? How do you fill in the holes of the engineers design? How can you double check your work? What do you do when their are mistakes in the engineers design? I plan on addressing these issues, and many others, over the coming monthly articles in an attempt to put together Simple Site 101.

First, lets get the definition of a simple site out of the way. A simple site is an engineers design that only incorporates proposed spot elevations and proposed contours into its design. There are no profiles. There are no detailed cross sections or typical sections. No super elevation diagrams. Just spots and contours. There may be a proposed building pad or a wall, but it still an easy project to cut your teeth on - or, as mentioned previously, to rest your teeth on after much meatier projects. Certainly each site is unique in its own way, but after you see one hundred of them, you realize that they all were pretty much the same.

I understand that this series of articles will be old news to many data builders who have established experience across multiple project types and sizes. But, since there is no generally available documentation that I have ever seen, I would like to put my efforts forth as a potential learned tool. For those who have never built data before, it could be a starting point for establishing their own data building procedures. For those who are more experienced data builders, it could be a chance to hear a different general procedure for data building. As I have mentioned in my past articles, I certainly do not see my procedures as anything more than personal preference - they are far from the end all, be all of data building techniques. But, since there's nothing else available, especially not free like these articles, then it will be good enough for helping newcomers get their feet wet in the world of data building.