About the Website

Design principles

The website has been designed with the following principles in mind:

• The website does not contain content, such as movies, animations, etc., that requires any software in addition to a fairly modern web browser.
• The website is designed to function to a workable standard on as wide a range of browsers as possible.
• Pages from the website are configured so they do not take a long time to download on machines that use slow Internet connections.
• The website design aims to promote accessibility and most pages have a Text Only link which uses the Betsie web parser.

Browser compatibility

The website has been designed to operate across a number of browsers on both PCs and Macs. Though we have built the website with one eye to compliance (see next section), our main design objective has been to test the website against commonly used browsers. The pages on this site have been checked on:

• Internet Explorer v6.0.29 (PC)
• Mozilla Firefox v1.0.3 (PC)
• Internet Explorer v5.0 (Mac)
• Mozilla Firefox v1.0.3 (Mac)
• Safari v1.1 (Mac)

HTML and style sheet compliance

We are in the process of redesigning the website to make the pages on this website comply with HTML 4.01 Transitional.

The pages on this website use Cascading Style Sheets and validate as being CSS compliant.

Design tools

We have used the following tools to create this website:

• Macromedia Dreamweaver, for constructing the web pages. Due to the number of files on the website and the complexity of the site we need to use an industry standard web design tool.
• Paint Shop Pro, for sizing and formatting images.
• Menalto Gallery, to generate the image library http://gallery.menalto.com/
• phpBB forum software.
• Betsie text parser.

DC-dot has been used to assist with generating and checking metadata on the website.