|
Broken links There are more than 1,500 inter-page links on this site now. Inevitably, some will be broken somewhere, and if you don't report them I won't know about it. With a flat HTML site like this, it's hard to stay on top of the situation because if I quickly write something and upload it, or add a download, there is always the potential for a broken link somewhere. Unless you use a CMS, that is always going to happen. Yes, of course, you can check them easily enough – but sometimes there isn't time, or the link checker doesn't report broken links to files (as against pages) properly. Just email me with the page & link that's down. Roll on CMS – the next project. Not easy when you use a cheap host, and on a dial-up connection. I might add a 'Donate' button to see if anyone wants to help support the site; yeah, and that'd be a cold day in hell... _______________________________________
The pages of this website are designed to load quickly on a slow dial-up connection, which many of us are still using, due to distance from an exchange precluding the use of broadband. Although an ISDN line is a viable alternative, this is still disproportionately expensive in the UK. The rural and coastal backbone of the country will have to rely on narrowband for the foreseeable future. This applies especially to marine users, apart from millionaires and a tiny number with marina WiFi access. Therefore, in order to maintain a quick loading speed, no animations or effects are used; no roll-overs; no nav bars; no buttons; no frames; no anything that will increase the file size. There are a minimum number of graphics. Everything has been sacrificed to fast loading, since you can be entertained comprehensively elsewhere. If you want information, you want it quickly. However, in one or two places, there might be an alternative page with the usual buttons, Flash effects, banners, and so on, in case you have broadband and a short attention span. Ocasionally, one gets diverted into Flash movies and Java applets... Techie Stuff I'm not really interested in SEO on this site, as at the moment I haven't got anything to sell, though that may change in the future. Fast WYSIWYG and html editors were used, plus Dreamweaver where useful. DW is the king of the link machines – or at least, my favourite version DW3 is – the current DW93 or whatever could be described as suffering from a little bloat by comparison... DW3 is a fast FTP sync & link machine. If you don't understand this, you should know that some coders prefer to use Windows 3.1 for their daily work: it's skinny and fast. DW, although good for anything a bit techie, can't compare for accuracy and speed of use with the super-fast pixel-perfect one-way skinny authors like WebDwarf and CoolPage. These are the fastest of the visual editors, having for years based their output on layers (divs) and CSS; apparently these are the latest advanced features of DW... CP is useful for browser-customisation, but unfortunately it is no longer supported, so that Safari – the Mac browser and now the second most popular browser after IE, going by the metrics logs on several sites I look after – doesn't feature. Maybe people will change to Camino, anyway. And neither does Firefox of course, which needs a whole lot more help, as it's still buggy as hell. People who know the score seem to use Firefox now, as tabbed browsers have a lot of pluses for those who spend time on the Net. However, page layouts can go wonky when it trips over CSS and layers (<div> tags); and even stranger things happen when it misinterprets PHP links somehow. If you see a query (?) in the middle of a sentence, that's Firefox acting up: it can't recognise an en-dash (an extended hyphen). That's when an ISO-8859-1 charset metatag is used; try a UTF-8 charset, as the W3C is pushing for now, and you get a funny little box in the middle of a sentence... Still, I'm not going back to IE, so let's hope they sort out Firefox PDQ. [edit: they did] Revert to Internet Explorer when FF starts playing up – remember, it's not a site problem if FF scrambles things, because the Mac / Safari users don't have a problem, and how can they be wrong? I have tried to eliminate website features I hate: • Pages that require scrolling to the right – lots of us view in a browser window, not full-page; • Pages with all-white or fancy backgrounds that are tedious to view; • Pages with frames that add nothing to the overall value; • Poor navigation logic, organisation, and links; • Tiny text that is difficult to read; • Pages without the site URL prominently displayed, so that when linked out framed or mousetrapped by another site, it's impossible to work out what site you are on; ...and so on; but there's always room for improvement. The main question at the moment is whether to optimise pages for CRT monitors viewing at 800 x 600, or flat panels using 1024 x 768. At present, it still seems necessary for a bias toward the CRTs, although this reduces the content for flat panel viewers – hardly a drawback on this site, which is designed to be a fast-access simple data resource. It views correctly in a window, on a flat panel. Hope you find the info on the site useful. Chris ^ TOP ^ |
Site Technical Info |