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We had great fun building this website, and we are very proud of it. We wanted the site to be an dynamic and easy to use, rather than just a collection of static pages. Here's how we did it.
The site uses a number of techniques to give users a fast, responsive and interactive experience. This is our chance to thank the coders who put together the open source software that this site uses.
By far the most useful tool to us was JQuery. This is a javascript package which makes dynamic elements such as slides and fades extremely quick and easy to program. Our drop down menu and tabbing system are programmed using just fifteen lines of jquery in total.
The Fisheye quicklinks menu is a JQuery plugin and can be found here.
We also made extensive use of Dynamic Drive for scripts and CSS layouts.
Finally Javascript Compressor was used to pack the javascript to further increase the speed of the site.
It was important to us that the site was fast to navigate and quick to load, so that the user experience was not interrupted. To achieve this, we developed a page loading technique which only loads new data. The header, left menu and footer don't change much, and this technique doesn't waste time and bandwidth repeatedly downloading the same content. This technique dramatically enhances the speed of the website.
All too often overlooked these days is backward compatability. We wanted the site to be functional in as many browsers on as many systems as possible. So if you turn off javascript (Tools --> Options on Firefox) you will find that the site still has full functionality, although without some of the bells and whistles!
As much as possible, layout and image loading has been done through CSS, which means that the site can be viewed comfortably on text-based browsers and even mobile phones.
If you have any questions or suggestions regarding the website, please do not hesitate to get in touch.