About Us - dUm's Geeky Stuff

Last updated (26th September 2004)

This page contians some seriously geeky insights into the structure and processes used to make CrossEvents website. Its not very interesting, nor is it really worth reading unless you are a serious geek...

CrossEvents is a surprisingly unique site for me in that its HTML was totally hand coded. No pre built templates were used, and neither were any visual interfaces, such as FrontPage. The HTML was written using Notepad2, a freeware version of the standard windows notepad. I used Notepad2 because of its ability to change the colour scheme of the syntax of the file that is loaded, essential when coding HTML. The website was also my first major attempt to use CSS and so far, I have to say that I am seriously impressed at what CSS can do.

The HTML itself is built on a nested table principle, with the main table defining the structure and then sub-tables handling more intensive positioning. This is a nightmare to code, even harder to visualize in your head, and a single missed tag can throw the whole set of tables out of the window... Fun...

The menu buttons on the top of the page came from a graphics pack on GuiStuff, where you'll find hundreds of free web graphics. They needed some cleaning up, and rather than spend a lot of hassle adding text to the buttons, I decided to try a different idea. The buttons are a nested table, with the button image applied to the table as its background. The tables columns then make up the positioning of the text, which is a hyperlink, emulating the text that would have been drawn on the button. Doing this saved us a lot of time and is a interesting concept...

The pages themselves are written to pass HTML 4.01 Transitional validation, which they all do, if it wasn't for the domain name redirection... ;) All the pages also use CSS to format the page, which validates under the World Wide Web consortium's guidelines. The icons for these are shown at the bottom of the page.

We've tried to keep Javascript and Dynamic HTML to a minimum. So far, there is Javascript for the scrolling text on the index page, and the Stat Counter on the index page. Dynamic HTML will be used in the future on the Gallery page, as we gather more images from the events.

The site is surprisingly cross-browser compliant. I personally use a developers edition of IE 6, which is more secure and features many useful development tools (such as HTML validation). So far the site has also been tested under Mozilla Firefox, Safari and IE on a Macintosh. The main browser left to test it on is Opera. The only issues raised so far have been that the page doesn't centre properly in Mozilla and Safari, and that the thick grey divider lines on a page do not centre in Safari. Since IE still holds the browser market (roughly 80 % last time I checked, this does not concern me).