Site Information

Accessibility

The site has been designed to be accessible by just about anyone with a browser that supports HTML 4 (with graceful degradation to 3.2) or above, with the majority of the scripting all happening on the server for maximum portablity. I've tested it on Netscape (3.xx, 4.xx and 6.x, 7.x), IE (3,4,5 and 6) and Opera (5.x+) all on Windows platforms. I've also tested it on Linux using Konqueror. All images have textual support via ALT tags, so if you have a slow modem, a disability or some other reason for switching images off, you should still be able to find your way around. Images have all been compressed to the maximum practical. All fonts are resizable and an appropriate CSS is used, via a script, depending on which client browser is being used.

W3C WAI/WCAG Conformance

All pages on the site (except the blog system, which is driven by a third party engine) conform to at least level A of the W3C Web Content Accessibiility Guidelines (WCAG), which are part of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Most pages, including the homepage, should conform to level AA or AAA.

Screen Resolution

All pages should format nicely to the screen resolution your are using although the site probably views best at 800 x 600 or above - I'm a firm believer in pages that adjust to screen resolutions where possible, and not use fixed width pages tuned to the lowest denominator so when viewed on high resolution screens you lose valuable screen real estate by haviing masses of whitespace on the left and right edges (or indeed the opposite of this, resulting in awkward horizontal scrollbars at the bottom of the window concerned).

Technology and Tools used

The site is clean, lean (for rapid download) and simple, with no fancy multimedia front-ends. The whole of the site is Active Server Pages based, using script generated pages for maintenance reasons. A minimal amount of Javascript is used on the client.

OK, so what did I use to produce this site?

I'm not a fan of fancy WYSIWYG editing tools I'm afraid. Call me a techy if you like (!), but I prefer my HTML and scripts to be lean and clean, and I'm not too impressed so far with some of the code generated by oversize tools such as Frontpage. Hence, the toolset I tend to use is as follows:

• HTML editing - notepad (!), Homesite (excellent), Dreamweaver or similar
• Scripting/coding - notepad (!!), Homesite, Web Matrix, Visual Studio.Net (a little heavy weight I know but has some very powerful features for .Net work...)
• Image editing - Corel Photopaint, Fireworks and Photoshop, plus the odd shareware/freeware tool

Obviously I use other tools and editors for my work, depending on whom I'm doing the work for and which platform I'm developing on. But the above summarises what I tend to use for my own site. I'm always on the lookout for decent tools for web development, so if you know of any good ones, please contact me.