Compton and Shawford on the Web

Technical notes

Browser support

These pages as originally developed were tested with IBM WebExplorer, Mosaic, Netscape and the Internet Explorer.
Now that the browser market is almost completely dominated by Netscape Navigator 4 and Internet Explorer 4 and 5, those are the browsers with which I do the most testing. I also tested the pages with the Opera browser until its free evaluation expired.
We use frames for navigation and tables to show much of the information - but if you have a very old browser which doesn't support tables there's a non-table version of most pages which is not updated as often as the other version

Usage statistics

The Hantsweb host automatically collects details on accesses to this site today and yesterday.
Detailed site access analysis since August 1996 is also available.

Site management

The site contents have always been made up of entirely static HTML and managed by hand. There are two reasons for this:

the whole site can be moved onto a local harddisk and demonstrated offline without the need for any server connection
I am dependent on an outside agency for hosting this site on the web - I don't have ready access to the server to develop clever cgi-scripts or to use server-based contents management software.

Tools

I've dabbled with lots of tools like Netscape Navigator Gold, the Composer component of Netscape Communicator and Microsoft Front Page. I've just imported the whole site into WebSphere Studio to make the whole thing more manageable. And I'm considering a major rework of the site using NetObjects Fusion.
Currently the tools I use the most are:
Product Comment

IBM WebSphere Studio WebSphere Studio, now in Release 4, is an excellent site maintenance tool for publishing to test and production servers. It has a lot of other strong features for back-end integration.

Allaire HomeSite An HTML editor (originally Shareware) with lots of timesaving features

Lotus WordPro Millennium Edition Wordprocessor with good HTML export capability. The HTML still needs some manual fine-tuning though

Caere Pagekeeper 2.0 Document Management tool - scans, OCRs and indexes documents. Various export filters including MS Word, AmiPro and HTML. I couldn't have managed without it. Pagekeeper Pro 3 is now available but as it uses TIFF format for image storage it's more expensive on disk space.

Pagis Pro Scanning suite Millennium Edition An alternative to Pagekeeper which I prefer in most respects except that it does not seem to be able to maintain its document index incrementally. Rebuilding the index whenever it needs to be updated takes a long time.

Xerox Textbridge Pro Millennium Excellent OCR product - produces HTML which mimics very closely the layout of the original document, needing very little hand-tailoring. Packaged with Pagis Pro.

PaintShop Pro 7 Shareware image manipulation utility. I find its colour scanner support better than that of more expensive commercial products.

Ulead PhotoImpact Similar to PaintShop Pro but adds button making and shadowed text tools

Corel PhotoPaint 9 Another Image-editing tool with some more fancy filters and a good rainge of clipart. Packaged with CorelDraw 7.

Adobe Acrobat For creating PDF (Portable Document Format) files. I use the Acrobat Capture program packaged with Acrobat for OCRing to PDF format as well as the ability to create PDF documents from Word Processors etc. Strangely enough Acrobat Capture 4 seems to be a little weaker than Acrobat 3 in handling black and white (one-bit), and Acrobat Capture 3 gave me a 3-bit colour option which I haven't found with Acrobat 4. Or maybe the 3-bit colour mode was a scanner driver options that was lost when I upgraded to Win 98.

Product	Comment
IBM WebSphere Studio	WebSphere Studio, now in Release 4, is an excellent site maintenance tool for publishing to test and production servers. It has a lot of other strong features for back-end integration.
Allaire HomeSite	An HTML editor (originally Shareware) with lots of timesaving features
Lotus WordPro Millennium Edition	Wordprocessor with good HTML export capability. The HTML still needs some manual fine-tuning though
Caere Pagekeeper 2.0	Document Management tool - scans, OCRs and indexes documents. Various export filters including MS Word, AmiPro and HTML. I couldn't have managed without it. Pagekeeper Pro 3 is now available but as it uses TIFF format for image storage it's more expensive on disk space.
Pagis Pro Scanning suite Millennium Edition	An alternative to Pagekeeper which I prefer in most respects except that it does not seem to be able to maintain its document index incrementally. Rebuilding the index whenever it needs to be updated takes a long time.
Xerox Textbridge Pro Millennium	Excellent OCR product - produces HTML which mimics very closely the layout of the original document, needing very little hand-tailoring. Packaged with Pagis Pro.
PaintShop Pro 7	Shareware image manipulation utility. I find its colour scanner support better than that of more expensive commercial products.
Ulead PhotoImpact	Similar to PaintShop Pro but adds button making and shadowed text tools
Corel PhotoPaint 9	Another Image-editing tool with some more fancy filters and a good rainge of clipart. Packaged with CorelDraw 7.
Adobe Acrobat	For creating PDF (Portable Document Format) files. I use the Acrobat Capture program packaged with Acrobat for OCRing to PDF format as well as the ability to create PDF documents from Word Processors etc. Strangely enough Acrobat Capture 4 seems to be a little weaker than Acrobat 3 in handling black and white (one-bit), and Acrobat Capture 3 gave me a 3-bit colour option which I haven't found with Acrobat 4. Or maybe the 3-bit colour mode was a scanner driver options that was lost when I upgraded to Win 98.