The making of these pages

Contrary to popular belief, WWW pages aren't magical beings that just pop into existence overnight taking only a couple of minutes of effort by an automated HTML program

The pages on this WWW site are the combination of over a year's work in writing articles, and tips, and many other little helpful things that you'll find.. After that there was a straight month of work between us in 'HTMLing' (the language of the World Wide Web) all of the documents, converting graphics, changing designs, and generally working at it, until we finally got something that we thought we all could be proud of.

Okay, you're creative legends... But how did you do it?

To start with, we muddled out a design for the contents page, and all the sub contents pages... From this, we scanned in the black and white drawings of the little character on the top of all our pages (His name is Boffin... He is drawn by Colin Norris of Kingdom Artroom, if you want to know more, see Boffin's Home Page).

From the black and white image, we loaded up Adobe Photoshop, and added colour and transparency information, then dropped the whole thing onto the cloud bar that now stretches across the top of all our pages.

While still in Photoshop, we created title bars for each of the main sections (The Bureau, Resources and Links), and used these two graphics together to make a title bar while loading as little data down to the web browser as possible.

Once we had the main headings done, we started to beef up our logo, also in Photoshop, rendering the letters, and adding a drop-shadow effect to the whole thing. Taking the 'T' off the left hand side of our logo gave us a nifty little bullet to use in our title pages!

After that, we wrote the HTML for the contents pages, building a base for us to work on. From there began the painstaking task of keying in much of the information on the pages (some was already in electronic format thanks to most of us preferring to type an informational article into the computer rather than putting pen to paper), and formatting the whole lot of it in HTML to provide the formatting of the pages.

Wow! I didn't realise there was so much in it... So why did you do it?

Our main aim in writing these pages was to have an information source that would actually be useful to IBM Desktop publishing, without a lot of commercial advertising being shoved down their throat.

When it came to putting the design and HTML together, we wanted to make pages that were fast to load, and were packed full of information rather than wasting space on pretty pictures, that while looked nice, didn't actually help you out much...

We came on a compromise with them both, with every image in our entire set of pages coming to a tiny 110k, while the total content of the pages being over 160k of straight text and HTML. It may not sound like much, but remember that as straight text this is over 160,000 characters with even the fastest typist not being able to key in over about 10k in an hour, and this is without having to add formatting tags...