The main drive in the development of this web page was the desire to have the minutes of the Shepherding meetings available to all. Initially this was achieved through putting them onto the discussion page of the UK UpCyberDown site. However, many people had difficulty accessing the discussion group and the number of readings was low. Additionally the format of the minutes altered into a tabular form which could not be read in the discussion group. It was then that I thought that I would have to build a website or just use an ftp site (not that friendly!). Never having written a line of HTML before I take this sort of thing as a challenge - it is also one of the best ways to learn. Following some thought, reading and websurfing I adopted the following basis for the site:
I trialled the site using the free web page space offered by Freeserve (my ISP). The terms and conditions Freeserve gave were primarily aimed at personal use and not for mass downloads. Therefore I kept the site as a basic information source and did not have hundreds of downloads or discussion boards.
As the site was well received I moved it to a seperate web host 1&1 Internet Ltd as this gave me an opportunity to have an easy to remember web address.
I aim to keep the site reasonable up-to-date and will try to amend it every fortnight or so. Please keep notifing me if errors crop up. Significant changes will be recorded - see the link on the navigation bar.
I'm sorry if the colours are not to your liking - send me your suggestions (or style sheets!)
Thank you for reading all of this, I wanted to explain some of my thoughts to those who may be interested.
The following are some ideas for future development:
I feel a short note is required on the different browsers. Initially I tested purely on IE 5.5 as that is what I used to use before I upgraded my second hand computer. However, I have used other browsers for reasons of speed and functionality and I felt that I should show some respect to other users. I generally test the pages on IE6.0 and Firefox 1.0 (Mozilla 5.0/Netscape). Occassionally I check the site on Opera v7.54. I like these 'other' browsers as they are quick, have tabbed browsing and follow web standards better than IE.
If you have any wobblies please drop me a line with some detail of the problem. Especially those of you using Safari or its like on Apple Macs. I do not have access to these and don't want the site to look horrible on the Mac.
As a side note, I had hoped that with W3C producing a specification for HTML and CSS that the browsers would not be too different. How wrong I was! There are pages devoted to the inconsistencies and errors thrown up, along with pages of work arounds. Only being a novice and with many other things to do, I have not paid as much attention to this as is required. Over time I hope to improve this.
A note of thanks here to the producers of some pieces of software that I have used during development. I like to use free software if possible (tight - yes that's me!) because they are often well written, easy to use and often uninstall better than most as long as they do not use spyware etc. The markup text editor I use is HTML-Kit which is about as comprehensive as I have found and provides lots of other extras. My ftp program is AceFTP v3.0 (freeware when I got it) and I convert files to pdf using pdf995.