About this website.

JLCA - better at entertainment than web design.

This web site was produced during winter 2001, by Jay himself. Gosh, he must be very talented.

We have tried to build an informative site, with a distinct lack of frills, that we hope will be quick to load over elderly modems and clogged networks. Please don't expect to find funky animated GIFs, wacky graphics, smarty-pants JavaScripts, or any other stuff like that, because you wont find any (unless we've been hacked!).

What we hope you will find is consistent style, succinct content, and functioning links. If - when - you discover that we have failed to reach our objectives, perhaps you would be kind enough to mail us with your thoughts. Jay is a thick-skinned grown up, with a full working knowledge of vernacular expressions, so please feel free to express yourself - unless you are a filthy spammer, in which case, leave us alone :-Þ

Show me the pictures.

As you can see, there is very little in the way of graphics on the site at present. Plans are afoot to spruce things up a bit, with some suitably small GIFs and JPEGs, to which end we have borrowed a snazzy digital camera, but first we have to figure out how to predictably format inline images (if you think that sounds a bit technical for your liking, then you know how we feel).

It is, however, our intention to gradually release images into the site, especially in the tightropes section, for which we already have a number of high definition images, and also in a proposed gallery section. In the meantime, there are a some nice pictures to be found in our promo pack.

I want to change the width of my browser's window.

Feel free. It wont make any difference to the way the site renders it's pages. When we designed this site, we took a decision early on to force browsers to view the pages at a fixed pixel width, which means that viewers using 640 x 480 screen resolution will never be able to resize these pages to fit the whole width on their screen at once. We have, however, endeavoured to ensure that the content part of the page, as opposed to the sidebar with the orange background, will fit neatly on a 640 width screen.

At some time in the near future, we intend to set up some internal navigation buttons, which might help, too. Meanwhile, for those of you who still can't see very much through your tiny screens, our advice is to buy a better computer. Or try the text only version (once we've set it up).

A bit about the design philosophy.

As a pitiful user of the dreaded Freeswerve, we are painfully familiar with the problems and frustrations of slow phone modems connected to slower ISPs. That's why we thought it would be a good idea to keep everything as simple as good be - that and the fact that this is our first proper stab at web design.

In testing, download times seem to be pretty good, though we are dreading having to put much in the way of graphics onto the pages. Moreover, we are aware that the information superhighway has a long-term contraflow near the virtual Hangar Lane Gyratory system, and plod has closed the slip road on the cyber-M6 at junction 12 (Cannock) after a particularlty nasty dung spillage.

For those of you with a technical bent of mind, you may be interested to know that we have tried to make the site compliant to HTML 4.0 and CSS 1.0 throughout, with the exception of the text only pages which use some elements of HTML 2.0 and 3.2, which while supported by 4.0, are deprecated nowadays, and therefore have an uncertain future.

Problems.

All browsers were not born equal, and any web designer who tells you that your expensive new site will work perfectly on any browser is stupid, lying, or both. Having already viewed this very site on a friend's computer, we already know that AOL does a few unexpected (though minor) things with the page formatting. Whilst we hope to address these issues as soon as is practicable, we are aware that you may be having your own problems. Sorry - why don't you blame Bill Gates? Everybody else does.

At the time of writing, the text only version of the site has not yet been prepared, but we hope to post something by the end of March. If you are experiencing any problems with viewing the page, please let us know and we will try other methods to satisfy your query.

Namechecks.

Thanks to David Houghton for ad hoc input regarding HTML and other things webby. This site was largely built using an evaluation copy of HomeSite 4.5 from Allaire, which is frankly wondrous. I just wish my rubbish server supported half the stuff HomeSite can handle. FTP was made easy by using WS_FTP LE from Ipswitch, which is a free download. Woohoo!