First Visit

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First Visit

Introduction

This is where you should come on your first visit to get a quick overview of what is in the various pages. Before going further it is worth having a quick look at our Mission Statement - it explains why we set up the site and who may find it useful. This Introduction is then followed by sections on The Layout of the Home Page, some details of What's in the Main Pages and How the Site is Presented

Layout of the Home Page

Navigation Bar: There are a set of links to the main sections of the site across the top. The colours reflect the style of each section of the site. There is also a link to a page allowing Searches of all areas of the site.
Introduction: The Home Page, as you will have found, has a very brief introduction to ourselves with hyperlinks to a few personal activities.
Index: There is then an Index taking you directly to the more interesting pages. We have tried to reflect into the index structure users identified in the "Mission Statement".
Feedback: Lastly and very important there is the opportunity to provide Feedback. We would be delighted if visitors could spare a little time to give us some feedback - it is the only way we know who has visited the Site, if it is useful and how we should develop it's content and the techniques used.

What's in the Main Pages?

We respectfully suggest that if it is your first visit that you do a quick scan down this section before being waylaid by the hyperlinks never to return!

News Flashes with the latest news, information and changes of interest to the regular visitor.
First visit - Where you are now.
Pauline's OU Homepage - of interest to her OU Students and other Tutors. This Section of our site has been set up to support Pauline's Open University Teaching on M206, B889 and T843. It has become a major part of the site. It provides easy access to the material used in her presentations, guidelines, best practice, support and resources pages and a "diary" of our experiences in Installing the OU Software on our Home Computer.
Uniquely New Zealand - A Touring and Camping Guide to the places a "Package" can not reach. It concentrates on the things that make New Zealand special and what has shaped the country, its people and their leisure activities. We are frequent visitors and are convinced that the simpler the lifestyle one is prepared to adopt the closer you will get to the real New Zealand and the better you will experience it's scenary, wildlife and sports. This section of the site is now on a separate URL www.uniquelynz.com as the traffic has got too high for www.pcurtis.com to support. The links at the top of the page take one from site to site as required.
Small Firms Section A section of the site directed towards supporting small firms who need a presence on the Web and/or simple networking. A number of new pages have been added to augment those in the Howto Series of Technical Articles out of which this section has grown. I am also considering offering just enough consultancy to get them up and running so that they can become self sufficient and be able to carry on using the level of technical support provided on our site.
Technical "How to" Articles This is the index to a series of articles written on how to set up and support various activities. Many originated in Diary of a Home Page as detailed documentation of various steps in setting up the computer, it's software, it's communications and the site itself and have additions underpinning the OU pages. New and updated technical articles may be listed below the main link for a period of a few months
Newsletters - of interest to friends. This is the equivalent/replacement for the regular Christmas newsletter that we and many of our friends have resorted to now we are spread round the world. They start in February 1996 with our visit to New Zealand. To keep it manageable they cover about a year with links to earlier years.
Travel highlights - of interest to those who want to travel the world. A lot of our older pages covering our travels were getting lost so we have added this page so they are still accessable.
Peter's Resume, Pauline's Resume and her Open University Lecturing and Consultancy Experience - of interest to potential employers, customers and students.
Recent Publications and Presentations - of interest to colleagues. The idea is to provide some of the abstracts of recent papers and presentations both for professional contacts and potential employers.
Diary of the creation of a home page - of interest to those creating a home page. This turned out to be much more wide ranging and significant than foreseen or the title suggests. It not only covers the "Site" but has a lot of the activities on the overall software system have spilled into the diary as they came out of the activity of creating a Site. It covers our experiences of Mobile computing and now extends to 6 parts. It has not been kept up so much recently as the Howto Series and Small Firms structure has become established.
Thoughts on Communications - of interest to those setting up systems. This covers the background thinking and implementation of the communications from our system. Communications was a major factor all the way through and this lays out how to get an integrated approach to Email, Fax, Snailmail etc with common Address Books, Filing Cabinets etc. It spills into an overall philosophy of working on the system.
Thoughts on Backup and Archiving - of interest to those seeking robust systems. This is another part of the overall system design and again contains some novel thinking on how to set up the overall structure to maximise its robustness. In particular it looks at the requirements of rebuilding rather than just reloading after a disaster on what may be a different machine.
Our Computer System - Rationale and Specification - of interest to those purchasing or upgrading. This has the original specifications we laid out before we selected and purchased our first machine and some of the updates. It is rather hardware oriented and the real meat on the software/system design is in the above sections (Diary, Communications and Backup).
Our Video Camera and Editor - of interest to those seeking a digital video camera and computer based editing system. Discusses how to get the best from our JVC Digital Video Camera, used for stills as well as video, and our Pinnacle Studio DVPlus editing suite
Watercolour Painting - Pauline's diary of progress since she restarted painting on a recent cruise - just admire or buy a print.
Peter's Home Winemaking page This, like many other pages, resulted from friends asking for information. It takes little extra effort to write things up in a way that is general interest and to serve as documentation for our own purposes. A major objective of the site is to save ourselves and others reinventing wheels.

How the Site is Presented

Heirarchical with Hypertext links: The format is basically hierarchical, including an index on the home page and lots of hypertext cross links. We try to put links to external sites whenever we reference other bodies etc. There are five valid entry points. They are to the Home page, Pauline's OU Pages, Uniquely New Zealand, the Howto Series of Technical Articles and the Small Firms section. The entry pages all have a similar layout with an identical navigation bar across the top. The sections all have a different "style" (background colour, and titles etc) which is echoed in the navigation bar.
Browsers: We try to look at all the pages with Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01, 5.5 and 6, Netscape 4.78, Netscape 7.1, Opera 6.02 and Opera 7 to avoid it being optimised to any one Browser and we try to avoid Browser specific features. HTML standards have however been evolving fast and some of the features used such as centering and background colours in tables are only supported in 4th generation browsers but those using earlier browsers will not lose information, only layout. The same applies for use of Cascading Style Sheets. There is little JavaScript involved in the presentation of the pages other than for "popup" pictures from small icons and some validation of form input. We only make use of ActiveX for presenting the Vugraphs from talks we have given via an easily downloaded plugin. There are details how to set that up and cautions on the security implications.
Standards We have converted all our pages to the World Wide Web Consortium standard HTML 4.01 Transitional other than for the use of a few instances of atributes which improve layout but are not essential if the browser does not support them. We are slowly converting pages to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to the World Wide Web Consortium standard 2.0. JavaScript is currently restricted to JavaScript 1.2. Many of the pages have a link to the W3C HTML validator and some to the CSS validator, the definative checks for compliance.
Pages are mostly on the small side for quick download. A few are larger and internally indexed so, for example, the Newsletter can be downloaded for reading or printing by friends off-line.
Text is mainly used in high level pages- we feel that most visitors do not want to waste time downloading fancy graphics unless they add value.
Graphics are at lower levels, mostly in the "newsletter", Travel and the Uniquely New Zealand sections. In most cases they are small Icons which display a title when you hover so you can chose those to click for larger "Popups". Some of the Technical Howto Articles for novices have screen captures to show how to setup the software. The Newsletters are becoming more pictorial and the use of graphics is bound to increase now web space is less limited and the speed of access is increasing.
javaScript: We have recently standardised on a Java based function to allow pictures to "popup" in a window when an icon is clicked. This function minimises open windows and brings new pictures to the foreground automatically. A study of visitors shows that under 5% of visitors do not have Java or have Java deliberately disabled - they will only see the small icon.