The Journeyman′s Workshop

Building The Website

The original website was built in 2007 and has been updated slowly since. Whilst building the original web site I tried to use fairly up to date techniques, that is up to date to me! The XHTML is as simple and straightforward as I can make it and I have used Style Sheets (CSS) to avoid huge amounts of unnecessary formatting codes. Most of the pages validate with the W3C for both XHTML and CSS.

2010 saw a major revision with the addition of a blog to replace the What's New page. Now I had never tried blogging before but I decided to use Wordpress to provide the necessary functions. I wanted to keep the site look and feel so I decided to write my own theme! After about a week I knew a lot more about Wordpress themes and decided to adapt an already written one. I chose the Arjuna theme by SRS Solutions as this was one of the many excellent free themes published under the GNU General Public License to adapt and edit for your own use. The adaptation is neither neat nor well thought out but it seems to work. Time will tell where the errors are. Wordpress is all about style sheets and I have used some of the old styling and transferred it to the new blog site. I don't think I mentioned that the blog is on a separate server to the main site and hopefully the two work fairly seamlessly together.

November 2011 and I decided that a new more meaningful name for the site was needed and the Journeyman′s Workshop was born. The new name needed a new look so a major rewrite of the CSS was undertaken both for the main site and the blog. A new CSS menu completed the look and like the original the menu system uses a server side include (SSI). The menu is entirely CSS and The original code can be found, along with many other great examples on CSS Play. The menu, with a few alterations is also at the top of the blog site and the CSS for the menu seems to work quite comfortably with Wordpress. Error handling is through the 404 error system that is available to most Apache Server systems. I have tried to make the error page useful by designing it as a site map.

Whilst very much a novice in web site design I find the concepts challenging and the use of CSS makes styling more consistent. I have tried to test on a number of browsers but still find it extremely difficult to get a site looking the same in Internet Explorer and Firefox. I tend to use Firefox most of the time and then try to find out why I.E. does something different. I have given up trying to make things work for Netscape 6 and I.E. 5. The latest versions of Safari Opera and Chrome seem to cope OK.

There are a couple of small Javascript functions that provide dates and calendars, I claim no particular originality for these having adapted scripts that I have found whilst browsing the web.

At the present time this site is hosted with my ISP, PlusNet, who provide 250mB for me to use for free provided I don't exceed my bandwidth allowance! Feel free to click the link, it might earn me a few pence.