No charge consultation

A website is a serious enterprise - it represents you to the world, so it is important that the site is accurate and good.

Your website designer must understand what your aims are, be able to deliver the goods, and is happy to work with you.

Initial phone conversation

We will first have a talk on the phone, to get a rough idea of your needs, and to make an initial assessment of our suitability.

Free consultation

If we then think that we can design your site, we will arrange a face to face meeting to discuss the work in more detail. This consultation has three purposes:

  • to determine what you need and want
  • to decide if OakenPage can do the work
  • to decide if we can work together

This consultation is offered without charge or commitment. We will not try to force you to sign a contract, or pressure you in any way - that's something we don't like when it happens to us, so we won't inflict it on you.

Of course, the consultation is a significant step toward a contract, but much more importantly it helps us see what really needs to be done and if there is a potential mismatch, before any commitments have been made.

After the consultation

After the meeting, we will prepare a brief summary for you, whether you decide to go with us or not. If you then think that we could be partners, we will prepare a full proposal, with costings. Only when the proposal is agreed and signed will you be committed.

currently place holder page holder for future ref

Dealing with bugs

Bugs happen occasionally. We hate bugs. We will clear up our bugs for free. However we do need to be clear about the responsibility.

Our bugs

Our bugs are errors in the site code [HTML, CSS etc] created by us, and spelling mistakes perpetrated by us during site when we add pages. Of course, if you provide content, then you must spell check first!

Your bugs

Your bugs are not our bugs. We will attempt clear up your bugs, if requested, but will have to charge for the time taken.

Once the site has been handed over, you are free to tweak it as you desire. Of course, that freedom does bring risks with it. Clearly, if your tweaking wreaks the site design in some way, we cannot be responsible.

After all if you buy a Porshe and then cover it with paint stripper, BMW is not the cause of the interesting effects that will follow!

Of course, we will do our best to help if we can.

Design changes

Design/content changes/new features are not bugs at all. We'll be very happy to discuss them with you and then quote for work.

Different browsers

Websites can look different in different browsers e.g. Intenet Explorer, FireFox, Opera, Safari etc. If properly designed, then the sites will appear and function substantially the same in most modern browsers. However, do note the following

  • 'Substantially' the same does not mean indentical
  • Old browsers may well show small or even large differences
  • Websites will almost certainly appear very different in handheld devices - mobile phones, PDA's etc

None of these are necessarily bugs, and may not be soluable.

Background to site maintenance

Don’t think of your website as an painting – unchanged for centuries. A website is much more like a garden – full of life and growth, changing with the seasons, but with an underlying plan and organisation.

We work like a good gardener – in it for the long run, interested in what the owners are doing, striving to improve the soil and enhance the site, weeding, pruning, planting and feeding.

Some owners want the gardener to do everything, while others use a gardener occasionally to do the heavy lifting, while they go out each day to get their fingers in the soil – we are happy to do either.

Developing for site maintenance

We work toward maintainable sites right from go. Part of this lies in the code we create - we use standards compliant methods - which dramatically reduce the burden of alterations.

Another contribution comes from the use of Content Management Systems [CMS] - if appropriate - a fact which we will establish during our initial talks. Using a CMS is absolutely essential for some site types, e.g. a large news site, but not at all crucial for others.

Doing site maintenance

There are three different sorts of maintenance that you may wish to undertake:

New content

Essentially, this means adding new text and graphics to the site. If you want to do this yourself, then, either you must be happy to work with HTML, or the site must be developed with a CMS.

We use Expression Engine [or WordPress] - in either CMS, you just browse to the site, log in, and then use a simple editor to create a new entry or edit an existing item.

New appearance

In the dark ages of website design, all the style information [graphics, fonts, typography etc] were intermingled with the content on each page. Nowadays all style information is held in one or two style sheets - files which define the site appearance. This makes it much easier to make style changes [sadly - a lot, maybe a majority of designers still do not use this invaluable technique].

Be aware that, even using stylesheets, some changes are still much easier to do than others. Changing fonts and background colours is generally trivial - changing a site layout, say from a one column to a three column layout is not.

New site sections

This will mean extending the main menu [probably], or providing some ways of find this new section, creating the code, functionality and style of the new section, and writing new content for the section. A simple example is adding a blog to a brochure site - to enable you to interact more with your readers, to talk about breaking news etc. Another example might be adding a forum etc etc. Clearly this type of maintenance has the potential to do most damage, but can be of most benefit to your users. Undertake with care and thought

Why technical details matters

How your site is developed initially can make a vast difference to various 'users' and to yourself:

  • Your users - when your site loads like a rocket, or creeps into view like a squashed slug
  • Your users - when the site 'breaks' in some web browsers
  • Your users - when they can't find what they are looking for
  • Your users - when they have different forms of disability and can't use your site
  • Your users - when they use various handheld devices and can't access parts of your site
  • Google, Yahoo, MSN etc - when old fashioned coding stops them understanding or indexing your site
  • Yourself - when time comes to develop the site further
  • Your pocket - when your site becomes really popular, and you have to pay heavy bandwidth charges on 'unslimmed' graphics

Modern coding techniques make it much easier to develop and maintain fast loading websites that are usable, accessible and search engine friendly. These qualities are all derived from standards based coding.

We will discuss web standards, the benefits of place style information into style sheets, and then look at the reasons for accessibility.

Web standards

Standards based coding is a style of coding that has come to the fore in the last couple of years or so. In an age where upholding standards is not fashionable, this may sound deeply retro. In truth, it is actually vastly liberating and well worth understanding.

In essence, Standards based means using HTML as it was designed – to define the logical structure of a page, and then controlling the appearance of the content via separate ‘style sheets’.

Benefits of being standards compliant

The benefits of using standards based coding are immense:

  • Sites will be compatible with future browsers [since the makers are finally committed to following the standards]
  • Easy to maintain and extend
  • Provide an excellent basis for accessibility
  • Search engines [being blind] love the well structured content
  • Pages are much faster to load

I can’t think of any drawback to this approach – the trouble is that many website developers are stuck in the past with tools that churn out tables based garbage. On the surface they look fine, but underneath….

History of HTML

[a little history of the decline and the rise of the web]

The web was originally developed for scientific purposes – communicating data between teams. As originally envisaged, it was seen as lots of formally structured papers [headings, text, tables and pictures] in a nice linear sequence, with key sections joined by hyperlinks to other relevant pages.

This was all done a very simple language called HTML. Unlike, say English or Chinese or even French, all the elements of this language are defined by a committee – the World Wide Web Committee or W3C for short. The early web browsers understood HTML and would display the pages quite happily.

All was well, lots of simple pages. But then two very bad things happened.

Browser makers competed to added new, exciting and non standard features. So a web site would look brilliant in one browser and total garbage in another – so the poor designers had to create different versions of their sites for different browsers. Versions that broke when the browsers were updated!

About this time along came the graphic designers, they saw the web pages and hated them for being so visually boring. To get the effects they wanted they used HTML but not as it was meant to be used.

Heading tags, for example, were used not to split up the text logically, but because different headings got different graphic effects. Worse, they used tables to control layouts. And tables within tables. And tables within tables within tables, even up to six levels deep – a horrible mess to create and even worse to update.

Colour and font information for these tables had to be defined for each cell in the table – leading to a massive redundancy – and vast amounts of time wasting if a change typography was required.

Looking at the source code for these pages [an easy matter – pull down the ‘view’ menu and select the source code option], it was almost impossible to see the actual content, buried as it was in the styling information.

The only solution to this mess was to go back to basics and use HTML as designed, purely for defining the logical structure of the page.

Stylesheets [CSS]

So, in standards based coding, HTML should be used simply to mark out the logical structure of a web-page, any hyper links etc. What then controls how it looks?

A key question given that the fundamentally visual nature of most web-pages. What owner would be happy if there was no control over layout, colour or typography in their site!?

W3C to the rescue! All this style info is [or should be] held in separate style sheet files. The style information is written in another simple language common known as CSS [Cascading Style Sheets ] which offers control over the final appearance of the page in your browser. CSS does not alter the content of a page, but it can make vast differences to it appearance.

The brilliant thing is that this one style sheet can apply to the entire site. This single file controls the house style for hundreds or thousands of pages. A single edit can change the font used in headers from Georgia to Garamond, its colour from black to charcoal grey.

Accessibility

The accessibility options in this site are described in another page. Here we are more interested in why you should be concerned about accessibility.

Most people's reaction, when accessibility is first suggested, goes something like this:

'politically correct humbug - websites are not like buildings or cars or things - they have to be seen. Blind people can't see, so why should I bother - indeed how can I - it's all meaningless drivel.'

Well - here are several things you might like to consider:

  • Google is a blind user. When Google indexes your site, it simply reads the text [if any], graphics are ignored. Some navigation methods are impenetrable to search engines. Can you afford to turn Google away?
  • Disability covers a complete spectrum of 'possibilities', including motor impairment as well as visual impairement. Most visually impaired people can see to some extend. Completely blind users use screen reader software to get into your site. Why turn a significant portion of the population away?
  • Your sight will probably get worse as you get older - think forward - why turn yourself or your friends and family away?
  • Accessibility is increasingly becoming a legal requirement. Why encourage the lawyers?
  • Accessibility also means making sites available to people with varying technologies, e.g. handheld devices. Why turn away a growing number of users?

In short, accessibility is a prize well worth striving for. If considered from the beginning it is moderately easy to do - but retro fitting accessibility can be really difficult - in some cases requiring a major site redesign.

Design for the unpretentious

'Design' does not mean some superficial styling applied as an afterthought to spice up a boring looking site.

True design consists of sound engineering and is essential to a useful website. Good website design includes:

  • defining site type - wether simple static pages, a blog or a full content managed site.
  • information architecture - specifying the site sections - including galleries, wikis, forums, commerce etc
  • dynamics - how the user will interact with the site - navigation and forms
  • graphic design - the overall appearance - colours, typography, layout
  • plans for the future - thinking about maintenance and growth
  • accessibility - impacts on at least two of the above

The purpose driven website

All these elements of design should derive from the purpose of your site - something that we don't initially know, and that you may be somewhat unsure about. Therefore we follow a standard process that we have found helpful:

Initial discussions

We will listen and talk and question and debate with you – until we understand what you do and what want others to know and do. At the end of this the purpose will be clear, and some design elements will have emerged.

You may already have clear ideas on aspects of the design and that’s good, but this time is essential for us, and is usually very productive for you.

Initial proposal

When agreed on the type of site and its purpose, we will start on the planning, detailing these aspects outlined above, and in particular the site type and architecture. This will form the basis of our proposal/contract. Sometimes we may have an initial graphic design ready at this point, sometimes not.

For small sites - the proposal may be a single sheet of paper, listing the various site elements [e.g. home page, map, about]. For large sites the proposal will be a significant document.

After contract signing

Once we have the go ahead, we will generally present you with a limited number of designs, from which the final graphic design is selected. We tend toward creating sample webpages for these mockups, since it is easier changing typography, moving things around a bit to get the desired results. These mockups may use existing logo's, graphics etc or may be completely fresh. The selected mockup then forms the basis for the look and feel of the site.

At this point we then complete the site architecture, code the navigation tools, and start populating the site.

We don't like to deliver sites that are a suprise. So, once there is something to see, you will be able to see it working [at a hidden location]. This will enable you to give comments and suggestions. Obviously, if you want radical changes - new site sections for example, then some renegotation will be necessary.

We will always aim to use best practise in coding your site.

What is website design

Website design, considered as a whole, includes:

  • graphic design [colours/graphics/typography]
  • architecture - site sections
  • interface behaviour - forms and other interactive aspects

We are not going to look at the last two items here - but you can read about the technical elements of design if you want to.

Website graphic design

It is important that the look and feel of your website is harmonious and appropriate. You will need to consider:

  • Layout: number of columns, placement of different page elements, effects under page resize
  • Typography: fonts used, relative sizes and spacings
  • Colour and images: emphasise elements, showing site sections
  • Navigation: main 'menu' for site - location, colours

[N.B. We have created some layouts to illustrate the effects of bad design - the relevant links are toward the bottom of that page - prepare to have your eyeballs shattered!]

Generally speaking, your graphic design should enhance the textual content, not overwhelm it - unless of course, you are a graphic designer or visual artist, in which case the graphic design IS the purpose of the site - and even then you will want to have clear contact details as a minimum.

Starting the graphic design

There are all manner of starting points that might lead to a good design. You may have existing artwork - a company logo, or brochures. You may have a technical illustration, or photograph or illustration, maybe some physical artifact, or even a colour scheme. Other websites can act as inspirations - though of course, we will not copy someone elses design!

The actual content of the site will clearly have an impact - some sites need a very plain but elegant interface, while others just cry out for a bold, eye catching design.

We can do this work in house - or retain an external designer according to need.

What is content

Content can mean all manner of things:

  • Text - articles, blog entries, essays, product descriptions, poems, reviews
  • Graphics - cartoons, illustrations, maps, photographs
  • Music - mp3 files
  • Activities - on line games, quizes
  • Comparisons - prices, products

Of course, some sites are almost self generating in content - forums and community sites rely on contributions from your users - though you will have to draw the users in first, and then probably spend time moderating the content [moderate - making sure that any contributions are appropriate and not spammy].

Creating good content

If you want people to keep returning to your site, then you must have good content. Obviously you will need some at the very start, but don't forget to think about new content as time goes on - especially true if you are running a blog or newspaper!

People have a desire for new content, so even a brochure site will benefit from the occasional brushup. Obviously calanders and charges must be kept up to date.

You may be a dab hand at writing or photography or recording, in which case you can 'easily' create your own content - though don't underestimate the time needed - you will often want to polish and clarify your first attempts.

You will probably find that your style changes for the web - writing tends to become more consise, and paragraphs are usually reduced to one or two lines. That's known as chunking - huge solid blocks of text are not easy to read on line - the eye easily gets lost.

If you are not good at content creation, then you will need to get someone to write your copy/take your photos for you - so don't forget to budget for their time/labour.

Finally, think about what your users want to know or do, don't be self indulgent, but if you can lead them to something new - that's brilliant.

Legitimate content

If we are going to develop/maintain your website then your content must be legitimate and not pilfered in any way.

Thus, you must either have:

  • Created it yourself - written the words, taken the photo, drawn the cartoon, played the music
  • Commisioned the unique work - and paid the write, artist or designer appropriately
  • Paid to use the work - a good example is the use of stock photo's from a library
  • Got written permission - from the author or artist

Fair use - means that you can make use of quotations from literary works, provided that they are correctly attributed, and do not constitute a significant amount of that work.

If the art or writing is out of copyright, then larger quotations or reproductions are permissible

OakenPage and hosting

OakenPage does NOT do website hosting - this is not our area of expertise.

However we can recommend some good hosts whom we have used before. We are happy to setup the necessary agreements, and to upload and manage your site as required.

Introduction to hosting

Your website has a name. When someone types that name into a browser, the browser has no idea initially, where to get the website text and graphics from.

The browser makes a request to one of the master computers running the internet [tech: dynamic name servers] - these act as enormous directories to the intenet - and tell that browser where to go! They provide the address of the computer that is holding or "hosting" your site.

The host computer will then provide the text and graphics and formatting data for the requested page, which travels over the physical cables back to your user's PC, Mac or mobile device. The browser takes this raw information, and with the formatting data, will generate the final page that you see.

The host computer must therefore be constantly linked to the internet, fast, reliable and secure against outside interference.

What a host company does

A hosting company owns one or more host computers. These host computers live [or should live] in a specialist data center - air conditioned, protected against theft, fire and flood, their every need tended to by well paid minions. The hosting company is therefore responsible for maintaining the computers physically, for security against hackers and fools, and for the connection to the internet.

Connection to internet

The internet consists of a huge network of cables - fibreoptic mainly, and other forms of communication - joining continents and cities and villages.

These cables are owned by various corporations, who lease out 'space' [tech: bandwidth] to companies that wish to send data [website text, graphics etc] from point to point.

A hosting company will therefore lease a link from their host computers to the internet from one or, preferably, more companies. If they have not leased enough capacity for all the sites they host, then your pages will arrive slowly or erratically.

Security

To act as a host, the computer must have the necessary sophisticated hosting software. This software is regularly updated by its creators, but the hosting company is responsible to apply the updates.

These updates are necessary because of various vile hackers who might deface your site or worse.

The updates and proper setup are also necessary because the host computer will typically hold many sites. Some site owners are not good programmers and might undertake tasks which can impact other sites - if the hosts are not setup properly.

Backup

A good host will backup your site at regular intervals, just in case something dire happens. However, you should not relay on this, even with a good host. We therefore keep archives of the sites under our management

Email

Emails are carried over the internet, and can be sent from websites. However typically a hosting company will redirect emails to your site, to a 'proper' email address of your choosing - this is known as re-direction.

More information on hosting

if you want to learn more, you could do worse than start with the wikipedia article on hosting.

Website names - what and why

The website name or url is the 'www.mysite.com' that you type into your browser in order to visit that particular website.

Every website must have a unique name. There cannot be two 'www.google.com's for example!

A bad name for your site can really hurt you, so a good name for your website is really important!

Bad website names

Lets start off by consider some pitfalls that you should avoid...

Cheap names

If you are a company or a professional, then you almost certainly should have your own address, 'www.mysite.com'. This will cost a few pounds, but pounds well spent. Don't look cheap by going for those offers where your name is just part of a greater whole, e.g. 'www.mysite.cheapskate.com'.

Poor Names

Poor website names are verbose, long or difficult to spell, even if they are 'correct'.

www.ukgovernementdepartmentofredtapesubsection3.com is not good, though it is certainly specific!

Stupid or unintended names

Some sites names look stupid when you see them, even if they sound ok. The human eye/brain is very good at picking up patterns in backgrounds - even if those patterns are not intended.

For example, lets take the 'department of red tape'. This might have the url 'deptofredtape.com' - to my eyes this looks as if it should read 'dep to fred tape'.

Another example; the BBC has a priceless url for their series 'Power of Art'. 'www.bbc.co.uk/powerofart' - indeed as they so aptly say - 'In Power Of Art, Schama returns to the intense moment of the work's original creation ...'. I guess that must have been about Damien Hurst then.

So - look carefully at your proposed name to see if there are unfortunate ellisions - it could save you from a world of grief!

Don't copy!

Dont even think about trying to go for rip-offs of big companies in the hope that you will pick up visitors by misspellings! This is known as 'typo-squatting' or 'cyber squatting'.

So gooogle.com or microsift.com are not clever ideas. They make you look look cheap and clueless or nasty (it's used by porn spammers to capitalise on childrens misspellings) and in the worst case might get you a visit from the lawyers [see this bbc article on Microsoft and cyber squatters, or this one by McAfee on Typo-Squatting].

Good Names

Good website names are pithy, short & easy to spell, recognizable. One of my favourites is for www.corkd.com - a wine discussion site - though it might be said that this could be misspelled easily, and you could end up at corked.com - quite a different site.

How to signup

If you dont already have a url, then please have a chat with us. It is easy to find out what names are still available, and we are happy to suggest suitable options.

Why purpose matters

If you don't know why you want a website, then we would suggest that you don't really need one!

If you know why you want a website, then half the battle is won. Users visiting your site will benefit from the clear purpose, and you will be able to offer them the right sort of pages and functionality. Just as valuable, you will then know what features you do not need.

Possible purposes

Your planned site could be a newspaper, a fan site, a commercial outlet, a forum, a brochure for a company, an introduction to a charity - one of many, many different possibilities. To help you decide what you want, we've roughly grouped the purposes into four - of course there is some crossover, but this should at least provide a start point.

1: Saying something

  • Brochure for a company, a professional or a charity - detailing products or services
  • Expert site - providing information on something where you have deeper than average knowledge.
  • Blog - you just want to have your say about things that interest or concern you

2: Showing something

  • Photo gallery - displaying your professional work or your amateur interests
  • Art gallery - showing work by yourself or your clients

3: Sharing something

  • Community forum - sharing information about your town, or some disease or ...
  • Fan site - discussing latest albums or gigs or films or books or ...
  • Club site - providing information about meetings, activities, competititons won and lost...

4: Selling something

  • Selling a small range of products - maybe just one item
  • A full commercial operation offering a wide range of products
yet more good stuff

Introduction to making websites

Or, more accurately, an introduction to how we make websites!

By the end of this page, you should have a clearer understanding of our values, our goals for your website, how we will design the site and the technical background to our websites. We will end with some notes covering financial matters.

Notes on the design phase and technical matters have been placed on linked pages, in order to keep this page within sensible limits.

How we will deal with you

We will deal with you honestly, promptly and courteously. We will not blind you with science, or claim expertise we do not have. If we think something is bad [technically or morally], we will not do it.

Our aim is to develop a happy, long term relationships with you - supporting your work in the best ways we can - so we will offer advice and ideas even when the site is 'finished'.

Our goals in website design

We have straightfoward goals for any website we create:

  • We make sites that are fast, simple to use and visually appealing.
  • We make it easy for your customers to do what they want.
  • We make our sites robust and easy to maintain and develop.
  • We make our sites accessible to people with all sorts of disabilities and viewing devices.

Developing your site

A website is far more than just pretty graphics. A good website should indeed have a elegant face. However it also needs to have a clear function, it needs to have solid foundations, and it must be able to grow and change in the future.

Financial

Once the initial consultation is complete, we will prepare a proposal, including terms and conditions. This will detail what is included in the site. You may want a phased development - some key features to be included in the first release and others to appear later - that is perfectably acceptable.

If you want extra features added part way through, we would be very happy to do the work, but obviously will have to charge appropriately.

We can either work on an hourly basis or for a flat fee - it has to be said that most of our clients prefer the latter. In such a case we would need a certain percentage to be paid up front - this does help concentrate minds! For larger contracts, we would need to agree on stage payments.

Introduction to website basics

If you want a website, but are not sure what's involved, then this page is for you - there's a simple summary of website essentials, links to child pages which flesh out the details.

If you apply the mnemonic- "Pages None Have I Dear" you won't go far wrong:

  • decide the Purpose of the site
  • choose a good Name, e.g. mybrilliantsite.com
  • find a good Host for the site
  • Invest in good content
  • choose a Design to match

Websites with OakenPage

A website is a serious enterprise - it represents you to the world, so it is important to be right. You may not have the skills or the time to create your own website. We however, are happy to design and create a website thats right for you.

If you want to find out more about the technical details of what we will do, then read the section on making websites.

Most websites present a single 'look' to the world. This house style includes graphics, colours, typography & page arrangement and is usually difficult to change. This is because the style information is normally all mixed up with the actual real content - the words.

However by separating the style from the content, into style-sheets, change is made much easier. Indeed we can offer different style-sheets to the user - each offering a radically different 'face' to the web site yet without changing its content.

For this site, we have created a number of style-sheets, which you can try out on this page. Some are usability aids - for people with disabilities or using handheld devices. Others are for show, and a few offer object lessons in bad design!

We want this site to be easy to use for as many people as possible. We have therefore used coding techniques which will help completely blind users and people with various visual and motor limitations. These are discussed in detail below.

We also want this site to be easy to use with a wide range of devices. If you are using a small screen device, then try the 'handheld layout'. Other layouts or skins are available - some of which are designed for particular disabilities - these will also be mentioned below.

If you have any ideas or comments about accessibility on this site, then please do contact us. Elsewhere on the site you will find notes discussing reasons for accessibility.

Page organisation

Each page on this site uses a logical (semantic) layout, with sections defined by various headers & sub-headers, h1, h2 etc.

Links are always shown underlined, and will usually have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target of the link. Global navigation uses a consistant set of links in all pages, and is displayed in a consistant position

Access keys & short cuts

Some people do not or cannot use a mouse. To help these people & those happy using keyboard shortcuts, we have defined some 'access keys'. In most browsers, an 'access key' will jump to a key page or standard location on the current page.

To use access keys - in Windows, press ALT + 'access key'; on Macintosh, press Control + 'access key'. If you are using the excellent FireFox 2.0 browser, you have to use SHIFT+ALT+'access key'. If you are using Internet Explorer, then you will also need to press the ENTER key after releasing the ALT & 'access key'.

  • Access key 1: Home page
  • Access key 2: Skip to content
  • Access key 4: Search box
  • Access key 9: Contact
  • Access key 0: Accessibility Options [this page]

Because these keys are site specific, and because there can be interactions with some assistive technology, we use a small set which are in common use.

Screen reader

Each page in this site is laid out with a semantic set of headings (h1, h2 etc) and paragraphs, which follow a clear logic, i.e. a single main header (h1) at the top of the page, and one or more sub headers (h2, h3) intersperced with text and graphics.

You can use keys in the reader to jump from header to header. In many pages, you will also find a 'page contents' set of links at the top of the contents - these link to the level 2 headers (h2)

Tables are not used in this site, unless for proper tabular data, and so will not give all that horrible 'cell' and 'row' stuff, when you are reading an ordinary page. Each page on this site is constructed of valid HTML, and so should not give any problems to your reader.

Graphics - where they convey meaning - will have an alt attribute.

Low vision

The term 'low vision' applies to a very wide range of quite different people! We aim to help these people in ways that are appropriate to the visual defect.

Large Text [text resizing]: Some people simply need a slightly larger text size to be comfortable. This site has been designed so that the text can be resized.

Text resize

Most browsers allow you to resize text or zoom the page - We list ways in some of the major browsers, either using the menu or a key combination:

text resize by Menu

  • Internet Explorer 5, 6 & 7: pull down the View menu, and select the 'Text Size' Option. This changes the font size to one of 5 sizes.
  • FireFox: pull down the View menu, and select the 'Text Size' Option, then Increase or decrease. This changes the font size.
  • Opera: pull down the View menu and select Zoom. You can then choose from a range of zooms [100% is the default].
  • Safari: pull down the View menu and 'Make text Bigger' or 'Make Text smaller'.

text resize by Key combination

  • Internet Explorer 5 & 6: none - these are crappy browsers - update them if you can for this and many other reasons!
  • Internet Explorer 7: press CTRL & '+' key to zoom up page, or CTRL & '-' key to zoom down page.
  • FireFox: press CTRL & '+' key simultaneously to enlarge text, or CTRL & '-' key to make text smaller.
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