The site was created early in March 1996, and the design is all the work of Phil Stewart-Jones (that's me, by the way). A lot of the content, of course, is from other sources. The images on the front page take up a total of around 40k, which should take around 20 seconds to download on a good 33.6bps link. Most of the images are re-used throughout the site, so the loading time is decreased for a lot of the other pages. Of course, when you've visited once, the images are cached on your own computer's hard drive, so you shouldn't have to download them every time.
The front page was designed on a machine running a screen of 800x600 resolution, and as such it doesn't look exactly as planned if you are using a 640x480 size display - to be honest, I can't imagine how anybody uses the web with 640x480. There's a non-frames option for those who can't or won't cope with them.
How it should look -
using Netscape 3.0 and a hi-color (or better) 800×600 resolution screen
There is no 'text-only' menu, as such. I can't honestly see the point of them; all of my images have 'alt' (alternative) tags, so even if you do not automatically load your images, all decent web browsers will show up the alternative text. The pages look fine on everything from Lynx (a text based browser - very underrated) to the latest version of Netscape. I try to keep a balance - keep up with the latest web ideas, yet still cater for those not bothered about the bells and whistles.
The site is optimised for the following browsers in particular (obviously, the later the version, the better it will look):
- Netscape 1.x - 4.x (PC, Mac, X-Windows)
- IBrowse 1.12+ (Amiga)
- Lynx (most platforms)
The site should work fine if you're using any of these, although certain bits may not look as I intended:
- Mosaic of any flavour
- Netcom Netcruiser
- AOL Browser thing
If you insist on using Microsoft Internet Explorer, bear in mind there are alternatives - the world doesn't have to run on MS software.
The webspace for this site is provided by my ISP, Demon Internet - 5 megs of webspace, individual domain names for my own computer and this site, full internet service, as many email addresses as I need and local dialup, all for a tenner a month? Truly Demon are the dog's bollocks. And that's a good thing, in case you were wondering.
The US mirror is hosted on Curve Communications' own server.