Technical

Geocities

I was surprised how easy it was to produce this web-site! I am not a computer 'techie', or a programmer, but (and here is the plug for my host) Geocities at Yahoo was very easy to set up. You need to set up a FREE Yahoo account - all you need is an email address - and Geocities offers 15Mb of free web-space. At the time of writing, this web space only uses approx. 6 of the 15Mb.

For anyone like me who does not know their http from their Java (see, I told you I'm not a techie) there is a very handy programme called 'PageBuilder', which is similar to Powerpoint or Word. It uses text boxes and easy insert functions, and while it mayn not produce the most advanced designs - it does the job! Geocities does have those small advertisments, but it's free and they are quite small compared to some web-hosts. But I'm yet to find a spell-checker, so apologies for the many spelling mistakes!

Visit the homepage at http://geocities.yahoo.com/v/pb.html.

The Web Site

I have tried to create small 'thumbnails' of each picture, to give you an idea of what is available before you link to the large picture. I now try to keep each large image to around 50kb, and each thumbnail around 10kb (Sept 01 onwards).

Click on the thumbnail for the full image, and click on the 'back' button on your browser to return to the gallery.

To protect my copyright, most pictures have a watermark in them to prevent theft. So sorry if this is annoying, but the other option would be a pay-for-access site. So I think this is a better option!

The older pictures (not necessarily by the date put on the web-site) are scans of normal 35mm prints. However the latest are taken with a Fuji 2400 Finepix digital camera, which I can totally reccomend! The pictures are taken on 'web' setting (~70kb) and the quality reduced down in Adobe Photoshop to ~50kb.

It is a balance between high quality images and download speeds, but please let me know if it is too slow, or if I have it about right.

So what do you think?

I'm interested to know what you think of the site. Either post it on any of the discussion pages listed in 'Links', or email me at muddytrainers@yahoo.co.uk. I can't promise to reply to all, depending on how many I get, but I'll try and improve the site based on what people say.