Techie Stuff

Here you will find some technical stuff about the website and downloads for various software such as Flash Player.

This website

This website has just (Oct 2001) undergone it's first major re-design since it was first setup in September 2000. The old site was fine and did the job - but I felt that it was getting a little tired. I decided to try and make it a bit better - not realising it was going to take SOOO long!

Checking the statistics from the webcounter showed that the majority of viewers were using Internet Explorer at 800x600. Personally I prefer Netscape and run at 1024x768. I realised that this was probably causing problems for some users as things look fine on my monitor - but would be all out of kilter on IE at a lower resolution.

Software

This site has been designed with a mixture of software packages. FrontPage 2000 has been the main tool for layout and Macromedia FireWorks has been used to create all the graphics.

Flash Player
The animated banners have been created using Swish which is great for creating Flash .SWF output files. If you don't see the animations you need to get the FLASH plug-in - Click on the button below. This will open a link to the relevant page in a new window, so this window remains open. It only take about 1 MINUTE to do!!

Shockwave Player
Worth getting - not required for this site, but is needed on many others. About 8 minutes to download. Just click this button:

WinZip
Probably the most widely used file compression program. The download is approx. 3 mins.  If you haven't got it, get it here:

(Instructions on download page)