about our website

Please read the guide below for information about our website. To re-visit  this page at any time, simply click the website information link.

This site is best viewed at a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels or higher, although pages should format satisfactorily at 800 x 600; this is because our pages use a fluid-width (rather than a fixed-width) template, meaning that at different resolutions (or if you re-size the width of your browser window) pages will scale to suit. Our grid layout mostly enables you to access any page on this site from any other page.

Graphics or photos are captioned, where relevant, and acronyms (shown in blue) are also expanded if you hover over them.

We make extensive use of Cascading Style Sheets (see below) and our pages should appear fine in any CSS 2.0-compliant browser. NB we preview our webpages in Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari; however if you do encounter any problems, then please e-mail us. [Incidentally, if you’ve ever wondered how pages reach your screen, click the ‘how web pages work’ link]

Our website is produced and maintained in-house, using Dreamweaver, the premier visual HTML authoring tool. One of its principal benefits, both for us and for you, is that it generates less bloated code compared to other editors. This code is easier to maintain, and makes for pages which load more quickly. We have not used frames or extensive animation or multimedia that often distract the reader; our concern with some of the ‘all-singing, all-dancing’ pages that we often encounter is that they represent cleverness for its own sake, without adding any real value.

Fundamental to all our web work (including this site) is enabling web pages to access information held in web-based databases. For this we use ColdFusion, an applications server that uses ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) and which is very closely integrated with Dreamweaver. [For a detailed exposition on CFML, visit www.cffaq.com]

Cascading style sheets drive the look of our website, which conforms to W3C criteria (see links below). CSS is a software tool that enables improved page presentation and makes pages very much easier to maintain, thus saving a great deal of time and effort, since a small change to the overall style sheet can be reflected across an entire website in seconds, irrespective of how many pages it comprises. Another key feature of CSS is an ability to use differential code, a practical example of which is how pages appear when you print (or print-preview) them. Pages have therefore been designed to be printer-friendly, meaning that by and large they appear reformatted, with all internal (and many external) hyperlinks removed. We also employ CSS to great effect in the work we do on client e-newsletters, in particular to maintain the relevant house style for each of our clients.

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