To many, this is the boring, technical bit about how this web site is put together. If you have come here by mistake or have no interest in such matters, please CLICK the BUTTON below to close this window. However, a small minority may be interested in the technicalities; especially those who are starting to construct their own web site.

The site was first developed in early 2000, using the Adobe PageMill3 program for Web Page creation. This program came free with a pack of HP InkJet paper in 1999, and was easy to learn and easy to use. However, Adobe had stopped developing this program any further and there were new techniques (especially Cascading Style Sheets) which PageMill could not support. In early 2001, the site was converted to Adobe GoLive5 and this software was incrementally updated to version 8, called GoLive CS2, by 2005. But in late 2005, Adobe took over Macromedia, the developer of Dreamweaver, and by 2007 GoLive CS2 was no longer supported. In December 2013, the site was converted to Adobe Dreamweaver CC as GoLive was unable to handle to now standard HTML5 and CSS3.

	The decision was taken to convert to Adobe GoLive5 in early 2001. This program was Adobe's mainstream web development offering; and described as "professional web authoring and site management". It was comparable to Macromedia Dreamweaver. Whilst GoLive was not nearly as easy as PageMill to learn, there is a related book including a CD-ROM "Adobe GoLive5.0 Classroom in a Book" (ISBN 0-201-71017-X), published by Adobe Press, which is a tremendous help in getting to grips with GoLive. In December 2003, this program was upgraded to version 7, now called GoLive CS.
Design Philosophy	The design philosophy has remained, from the start, to make it as fast as possible to find a particular individual's details in the site and to make navigation from one person to their direct relatives as quick and easy as possible.
	To make long term maintenance much easier, to minimise the size of HTML pages and to keep in line with browser developments, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were used extensively from the start. (The disadvantage, back in the year 2000, was that not all browsers supported CSS; now all except the very oldest browsers support CSS. The obsolescent browsers will miss the formatting but, hopefully, not the content).
	Frames can certainly facilitate navigation (for example, by having a sidebar with the menu always present), but the decision was taken to maximise the screen area available for the display of the actual genealogical information and, therefore, not to use frames in the site. This proved to be a fortunate decision
	In the year 2000, the average user probably ran their screen at a size of 800x600, and this site was optimised for this sized display, without the need to use a horizontal scroll bar with the main pages. Pictures have generally been sized to fit such a display area. In the year 2005, displays of 1024x768 have become the norm, and the opportunity will be taken to use this larger screen size when new pages (particularly with images of documents) are added to the site. With the smaller 640x480 size, a horizontal scroll bar will be inevitable and, whilst normal text wrapping should look OK, some of the headings may look strange.
	Some users choose to switch off Java, for security reasons, although with an active antivirus program like McAfee VirusScan or Norton AntiVirus, Java and JavaScript should pose no problem. This site makes use of both Java and JavaScript in, for example, handling actions for some of the buttons and pop-up windows (maps, etc) and displaying panoramic views, which will not work without Java and JavaScript enabled.
	For Internet Explorer (4 and above), WEFT (Web Embedding Font Tool) allows the embedding of fonts, especially the less familiar ones which few people will have installed on their computer. CLICK HERE to see if WEFT is working with your browser. For Netscape, this is no longer possible (see email to me from Bitstream below) as Netscape withdrew support for dynamic fonts in version 6 and this is still the case in version 7. For this reason, Netscape can no longer be recommended as a suitable browser for this web site. "We regret to inform you that Netscape has not included Bitstream's dynamic font technology in the release of Netscape 6. This Netscape decision was based in part on the desire to keep the browser size small. Netscape has encouraged Bitstream to try to develop a dynamic font plug-in for Netscape 6. We are actively working to build such a plug-in but have run into problems that can only be resolved with Netscape's cooperation. We will keep you advised of any new development in Netscape 6 support for Bitstream WebFont technology."
	Where complete supplementary documents are available for viewing and downloading, they are normally converted to the Adobe Acrobat portable document format. This helps to reduce the file size for downloading but more importantly ensures that the format is exactly what the author intended. The free Adobe Reader (only the latest two versions are supported here) will be needed to read any of these documents.