About This site.
This is a very varied site. Much of it is devoted to family matters and photographs, but there are specialist sections on kites, kite aerial photography (KAP) and other hobbies. Please explore the site and let us have feedback.See the "Contacts" page for this.
The design is all new from August 2004. If you are interested in such things, please read further in this section. You may be able to offer advice on improving things.
As far as I am aware the site works well on Mozzilla 1.7,Firefox, Opera 6.0 etc. It works with fudges on Internet Explorer 6.0 and with more fudges on 5.5, but not as it should.
Happy Browsing
More...
This new site has been written for a number of reasons.......
This is the fourth or even fifth incarnation of the site. The first few were using on-line tools, and hosted by free web hosts, e.g. homestead and supernet. These were poor sites! Moving to Plusnet as the ISP started the proper www.jlwilliams.co.uk site. At first it was written using Word and Publisher, later moving to Frontpage.
The site became very extensive and had a number of make-overs. The main problem was that it became unwieldy to maintain and update. In addition is was not simple to navigate and looked out dated. If not on broadband it was also very slow.
The file structure of the old site was incomprehensible, resulting in lost web space due to duplicated files etc.
The desire..
In writing the new site, I had a number of things in mind:
- I wanted a site that was clean looking, without extensive backgrounds
- It must be easy to navigate
- It must be easy to update
- It must be easy to change on a large scale without losing content.
I also wanted to learn more about HTML, and not rely on Microsoft products so much! I have recently moved away for MS Internet Explorer to using Mozilla 1.8. I also use Mozilla Firefox and Opera 6.0.
I had learnt a few html basics, and started systematically working through the "webmonkey" tutorials on the Web. This made me realise that it was not as complicated as I thought. I used notepad, rather than any fancy html editor or web program, and this made life must simpler. Once I reached sections on cascading style sheets (css), my eyes were opened, and with the additional help of Elizabeth Castro's excellent book "HTML for the World Wide Web (5th Ed)", I moved on.
A number of site policy decisions were made:
- Keep it simple! Only do what I understood, and bearing in mind my lack of design ability, it is a mistake to try to pretty things up!
- Stop putting in lots of links. I have worked on the basis that visitors are capable of searching for themselves, so links are not needed. This stop links going out of date!
- DO NOT use frames. I used these extensively in the old site, and realised how it made the site clumsy, was hard to update, was often poorly viewed by the visitor, and didn't make life easy for searches.
- Try not to use tables. These make it harder for the visitor to re-size things, and were too complex for me to follow in pure (x)html. In any case, .css made them necessary didn't they!
My lessons were gong well........
Then I found out that .css isn't that well supported by some browsers. My beautiful pages looked different depending on what browser was used!
Browser Wars!
Here is a screen shot of what I thought a page should look like. In Mozilla 1.7/1.8, and I assume more recent Netscape browsers it is fine. This shot is from Mozilla Firefox 0.9.
Opening the page in Opera 6.0, I realised that I had been playing with boxes, and not taken them out! Mozilla hadn't picked up this aspect of .css.
As for Internet Explorer. Who is going to shoot Bill Gates?I though I was working to an agreed international standard.
It seems that ie6 wouldn't handle much of the .css code at all, the layers don't work, there is no scrolling,and sizes all change! This was a real problem as sadly most people still use Internet Explorer.Had I wasted many hours of learning?
Back to the search engines. I wasn't the first to complain, and fortunately others have found ways round this. Style sheets that were the cause of my problems also came to the rescue. I simply developed three style sheets, one for sensible browsers, one for ie6, and one for ie5.5. There isn't a real problem for older browsers, as they do not support .css, so interpret the pages as they wish. This seems OK,and is probably easier for the author, than pages that are made with lots of tables and frames. Let me have a screen shot if this is you.
All that was left was to include a fudge factor in the header section to direct the browser to the correct style sheet:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="kitestyle.css" type="text/css">This is the standard reference for the main style sheet"kitestyle"
<!--[if IE 6]> <link rel="stylesheet" href="kitestyleie6.css" type="text/css"> <![endif]-->This calls up a different style sheets for ie6 browsers
<!--[if IE 5]> <link rel="stylesheet" href="kitestyleie5.css" type="text/css"> <![endif]-->This calls up a style sheet for ie 5 browsers.
Does it all work? I hope so! It appears to be OK on my test shots. I would be happy to know what your view looks like. Press "print screen" on your keyboard, and paste it into an e-mail or document to me.
If you have read this far, you probably know much more than me, so I would be very pleased to receive feedback and advice. Use the Contacts page.
Many Thanks.
©John Williams 2004
I support this mail client and browser... This is not just an advert.
Let's take control back from microsoft
John