About this site
Keyboard Access
You don't need to use your mouse to navigate this site - you can access the top level of the menu with the keyboard. (The "drop-down" menus don't appear, and the menus don't change colour, but it was impossible to do this without using Javascript). There are two ways to use the keyboard:
Tab key
Just use the tab key to go from link to link.
Accesskey
You can also access the top level of the menu using accesskeys - keyboard shortcuts. There is no standard for which keys to use; we have numbered the menu entries sequentially from left to right. To invoke accesskeys on Windows systems you have to press the alt key followed by the key. For instance, typing alt 4 (you may still need to press enter on some browsers) takes you directly to the catalogues. Mac users should use the cmd key instead of the alt key.
Browse happy
Internet Explorer is unsafe and there are free alternatives such as
Firefox and
Opera.
Naturally, this site supports these browsers because it is standards compliant.
Standards compliant
Standards are important because they mean that it doesn't matter what kind of browser or computer you use. All the pages on this site comply with the standards of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - we actually code all the pages by hand to achieve this. That's what the logos on the bottom of this page mean. To ensure compliance we verify all our pages on the W3C validators.
Site designed for 800x600
Almost 4 out of 10 webusers worldwide (not in the UK!) have a screen resolution of 800x600 or less. Accordingly this site is designed for that screen size. This is the policy followed by many international sites such as the BBC.
The really geeky stuff
Development Server
This site uses Server Side Includes so I needed a web server to test it. I used the Abyss Personal Web Server. It's compact, free (registration required), reliable and not made by Microsoft.
CSS menus
The drop-down menus use no Javascript and are standards compliant. They are closely based on the work of CSS guru Eric Meyer. See his book More Eric Meyer on CSS. Visit also the book's website.
Where next?
Back to our home page.
Back to wherever you came from.
