Nick Chalk
The aim of this page is to give you an idea of what is required to design and maintain a website. I hope to show you that the latest computers and expensive software are not required. All you need is a little time.
Firstly, a little information about me. I'm not a Graphic Designer by profession, nor am I employed to maintain this site. I work for one of the larger mobile phone manufacturers, as a Radio-Frequency Design Engineer: that's about as far from computing as you can get whilst still being in Electronics. All that I need to know to maintain this site - HTML markup, Perl programming, CGI, SSI - I've learnt from the Web. If I can do it, so can you!
The system I use to work on the site is not the height of sophistication. This is a comprehensive list of the hardware at my disposal:
The A5000 is about six years old now, and still going strong. The monitor stands out a little there; the reason for having such an over-specified display was the sudden demise of my Acorn AKF18 last year. It made little sense to buy an inferior device.
As for software, I use only one commercial package. Everything else I've downloaded from the web entirely for free.
The ANT Suite is not essential to my work, it simply provides a network connection. As you can see, I have in fact replaced one of the Suite's components with a free alternative. In contrast, sFTP is essential: uploading the site without being able to put multiple files would be unthinkable!
Some may be surprised to see Draw and Paint listed. These I have used for the Archive logo above, for the section titles on the front page, and for all the other drawings on the site. For example, the logo and the front page links were all created in Draw, using the Electronic Font Foundry's LondonA typeface. The image was then captured using Paint's snapshot, trimmed, and converted with InterGIF. Since minimum download time is the overiding objective, the images have all been reduced to sixteen colours, or four bits per pixel. For this level of graphics processing, an A5000 is no restriction.
The current page design was inspired (if you can call it that) by a letter from Fujitsu Semiconductors. Although I have been assured that it is a fairly common design, I was impressed by the clarity of the monochrome layout. Sticking to black and white is also a fairly safe bet when you are not overly endowed with artistic skill! Almost all of the images around the site are text-based; again, it is a simple and (I hope) fairly effective way of adding illustrations.
I have tried to make the site as widely accessible as possible. The basic approach is to stick close to the HTML 3.2 standard, and ensure that the pages validate with HTMLcheck. Where I know some browsers will have difficulties - tables, for example - I have either provided alternatives or ensured that the page still renders. The Web Designers' Reference has links to some useful accessibility guides. The frame-based navigation bar was an experiment to gauge people's reaction - so far I've had none!
Designing web pages and building a site is not difficult or expensive. If you have something to say, or a service to provide, why not try it, and give something back to the Internet community.
Nick.