About This Site
I originally created this web site in 2000 at the height of the internet boom, as an exercise to learn about the technology, and a way of sharing information with friends and colleagues. It then languished untouched for several years. By the time it was rebuilt and refreshed in 2006, the technology had matured considerably, and the latest version takes advantage of the latest best practice to ensure clarity of structure and ease of maintenance.
The design of the site separates content from structure and from presentation. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) enable consistent presentation from page to page, and presentational changes affecting the whole site can be made once in a single place. This also avoids the use of HTML tables or frames for laying out each page.
The navigational menus are also separated from the content of each page - light use of PHP has been used to achieve this. The structure is designed to be extendable without having to go back and re-edit all the pages that have already been published. The hosting environment also has a MySQL database available (in case I ever find a need for it).
I have also tried to make the content accessible to the widest possible variety of devices, by sticking to XHTML 1.0 Transitional standards. This preserves the logical structure of the content even when the presentational technologies I have used are not supported by the system accessing the site, for example on a PDA.
The site is hosted by Streamline.net.
