How the New Site is Built:
Most of this site consists of pages created in Microsoft Word 2000, so that parts of the site can be edited by members without specialised software or knowledge of html. Word is surprisingly fast and flexible as a Web editor, even though it was never designed for such a purpose. But Web pages work quite differently from word processor pages, so it does have limitations – especially when it comes to images and when tables are needed to position things exactly. It’s also difficult – though not impossible – to add hand-coded html or scripting.
	So now the framework pages are hand-coded in html, and so are some of the pages that show images. The site uses ‘frame’ pages to make it easily navigable and to handle one or two other situations. But search engines don’t read through frames, so to make us more visible we’ve added a non-frame index (the ‘Leaves Online’ link on the front cover). Frames can also make parts of the site faster, particularly with images and decoration, and are the key to allowing other members to take part in maintaining it. At present there aren’t any other members involved: we’ll tackle that when things have bedded down a bit more.
Graphics are scanned and edited mostly with Micrographics Picture Publisher, Corel Photopaint or Paint Shop Pro. PSP is an inexpensive editor, and very easy to use for web pages. But it doesn’t have everything we need when we want to create original art work or edit colour slides or negatives which have faded over the years. And the chickens? They’re drawn in Corel Draw (which is a ‘vector’ graphics package) and then converted to GIF. The finishing touches are applied in Paint Shop Pro.
	This edition of the site is tested only in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 running under Windows 98 and at a screen resolution of 1024x768 pixels, though we also check at lower resolutions. Once we’ve settled down we’ll test the site in other browsers including Opera and Netscape (but probably not AOL). We won’t be able to test on Mac. If you’re having problems with our site, email me as webmaster@carltonlewillowsgs.org.uk and tell me what’s wrong. Do please also tell me what browser, operating system and screen resolution you’re using, and if we can do something about it, we will. Whatever browser you use, it must be able to handle frames – but if you’ve got this far without resorting to ‘Leaves Online’, it does.