It is the evening of Saturday May 1st. I am just writing this Front Page, which you may well think, rightly, is far too late for an issue which should have come out today. Let me explain.
When I first started this web site, in June 2003, Roy Radford kindly e-mailed many friends of his, around the globe, and told them to have a look. In addition to the usual nice comments, there were a couple which puzzled me, as they said that they had problems just looking at the site, with all the words and pictures overlapping all over the place.
Being a novice at web design, I had done a lot of reading up on the subject and had learned that what you see is determined by what browser and which version of that browser you are using to look at the web. I contacted the folks concerned and gathered that they were using rather old versions of Netscape and so put the problems down to that. I was too busy to take it any further but made a mental note to look into it later.
As you know, my wife has a web site for our horse (it takes all sorts!) and she told me that our daughter was having trouble seeing her site properly. As our daughter has long been having troubles with her computer, we again didn't think that there was much we could do about it.
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One of the main things you have to do, when you have a web site, is to get people to look at it and one way to do this is to link to other people's sites. I had been asking other 'horsey' sites for a link to my wife's site, when one site came back and said that they couldn't do it, at the moment, as the words and pictures were all over the place. The guy was really helpful ( he was Bruce Ross Smith of the professional web designers Crofter Internet Ltd of Spreyton!) so I asked him to check out this site as well, to see if he got the same problem.
He got back and said that Beacon Villages also gave the same problems and recommended changing our web writing software. What he actually said was that our existing package was 'a bit like buying a lawnmower from a washing machine manufacturer'.
To cut a long story short(er), I investigated and found out that our existing package had a reputation for - guess what? Right, overlapping words and pictures. So, we took the plunge and bought the (expensive) market leader package at the beginning of the month. It was a bit like having to fly a space ship after driving a VW Lupo. What followed was an intense learning (and unlearning) process entailing many very late nights and even more tears and cuss words.
And then, to add to our joys, Carol (I cant keep saying 'my wife') was asked to take over the web site for SWEP - The South West Equine Protection charity. She inherited another 40 pages and I was struggling to learn and then convert our 120 pages. Which I did, just, by last night. I have spent all day getting this month's Photo Album up and now am just about to put this month's Journal together. It is the first time that I have been glad that some contributors are a bit late with their submissions.
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What do you get for all this trouble? Well, I took the opportunity to partially redesign the site in an effort to a) make it more accessible and b) to speed it up. The few test runs I have been abler to do, seem to indicate that this, in fact, has worked. I will be spending this month checking still further and getting the new feature - Archives - up and running. If you do spot any problems with the new layout, please do e-mail me.
I would just like to finish with a further apology and a plea to our visitors. When I was putting the Photo Album together, I found that I was really pushed to find material for the 'Events' group, I have been so busy that I have not got round to going to any real events this month. But many of you have and some, the organisers particularly, have probably got photos. If you have, why not let us put them up for you?
Please don't be shy and think that they must be 'good' photos. It is amazing what a bit of computer 'tuning' can do to make your photo look good. The most important thing is the subject matter. Is it an event happening in the area or about someone or something to do with the area? Does it contain anything of interest to Journal visitors? If so, then let us borrow it to scan it in and then return to you,
The Events Calendar appears to be working well. My only problem is, as usual, the lack of information being submitted to me. I usually have to glean the info by reading posters put up on lamp posts, read it in The Beacon or see it in the Oke Times. If you can go to that amount of effort, why not also let either me or your Village Correspondent know too?
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