Using Our Site
Browsers
We design our site to work with as many browsers as possible. We regularly test the site with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Netscape Navigator RealPlayer, Mozilla and Amaya browsers.
The latest incarnation of our site uses some funky Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) features to make it easier to edit the pages and to change the design of the site without having to change all the pages.
Some older browsers don't implement style sheets correctly so you may not be able to see our site in all its glory until you upgrade to a more recent version of your browser. Even some current browsers, like Internet Explorer 6, don't implement these style sheet features properly, but we have included well known workarounds so the site still looks correct. Hopefully Microsoft will get their act together with Internet Explorer 7!
If you've only ever used the Internet Explorer browser that came with your computer, please download
and try out Firefox. It's so much faster and so much
easier to use.
We have tested the site with Opera's astonishing Small-Screen Rendering option. And it works very well. So it should be useable on the new generation of Smartphones and PDAs.
Accessibility
Our site follows the W3C-WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.
You should be able to use the site in a text to speech browser, scale the text size to make
it easier to read, or even replace the style sheet with one of your own.
Search Engines and Site Directories
If you ever forget the address of our site, you can find it easily enough on most search engines and site directories. The last time we checked we were listed on these:
Google, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo Search, dmoz, BBC Search, MSN Search, AlltheWeb, mamma, AltaVista, Wanadoo and Tiscali Search.
Contact Us
If you have any problems with the site, or want to ask any questions, send us a message.
How We Built It
Hosting
This web site is hosted by Hostway. They're easy to deal with and sites like this cost very little to run. We recommend using them for your own sites.
We test the site using the web server built into Windows XP Professional.
Web Pages
To create web pages we use Macromedia HomeSite 5. You have to know HTML to use it, but it's simple, it's good value and we recommend it.
If you're building your own site please feel free to borrow anything we've done. You can get the source HTML for any of our pages by right-clicking on the page and then clicking View Source (Explorer), Frame > View source (Opera), or the like, on the pop-up menu. You can also copy our stylesheet.
Site Search
The search box on our site is powered by Google. It's very simple to get it working and we recommend it.
To set up a similar search for your own site you just need to add your
site to Google and then add their free site search code to
your pages. Once you've got the hang of that you can even customize
Google so that it looks a bit more like the rest of your site.
Images
To draw and edit images we use Adobe Photoshop Elements. It does everything a home user could want at a fraction of the price of the professional Photoshop package.
We like Canon cameras, and most of the photos in the Fun and Games section were taken with a Digital IXUS 500 or 300, although some were taken with an original IXUS APS and an EOS 500 35mm.
Our main section icons are based on images created by Dirceu Veiga at www.shoffar.com.br. Most of the images in the Our World section are reduced versions of full size images from the sites we link to, but several were taken with one of our Canon cameras.
Family Tree
We use the Personal Ancestral File application to manage the family history. It supports the standard GEDCOM format so we can exchange family tree information with just about anything else.
We use GenoPro to draw the final family charts, and we use the Adobe Create PDF Online service to create the printeable versions of the charts.