St John the EvangelistHills Road, Cambridge CB2 2RNIn the Diocese of Ely |
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Technical notes
This web site has replaced one that was in place for around 5 years (dating from around year 2000). Since 2000 web technologies have changed considerably, as also have the expectations of those who use the internet. The other change is that everyone has less time, which means less time to maintain the site.
For the techies amongst the readership, you may find some of these notes interesting as to how I set this site up.
- Like most web sites these days, the layout and style is set up using cascading style sheets. In particular, CSS enables me to place our centenary tapestry (the image on the left) prominently on every page.
- The other recent innovation has been Google Maps, and version 2 of the API came out during the time I was setting up these pages. Version 2 gives us higher resolution satellite images. For the interested, I got most information on the Google Maps API from the links from the main Google Maps API page, and from an unofficial tutorial site.
- The Google Maps pages needed to be programmed by hand using javascript; with the help of the above links this turned out not to be too difficult.
- I wrote the html and non-Google javascript using Adobe GoLive.
- Images were compressed for web viewing using Adobe Photoshop's "Save for Web" option. This allowed us to reduce file sizes considerably.
- One design criterion was to minimise the anticipated maintenance requirements. No-one has time to do a lot of maintenance work, and thus without care there is a risk web pages will have out-of-date information. Thus we have avoided the use of names of people where such names may change.
- We also took the view that pictures tell messages, and thus we have used pictures to give impressions of life in St Johns.
- Uploading files to the Ely server is now very easy! Thanks to Simon Kershaw!!!
I hope the web site is something you can enjoy!