About our web pages.

Our web pages are completely written by us because this gives us the day to day flexibility that we want - of course it also gives us responsibility for design and putting the content in. To start with we used Microsoft Frontpage for creating the pages but quickly found that it generates pages that are heavy with stuff you do not need - as a consequence they downloaded slowly. An example was a results page copied in from Word. The page ended up at over 1mb in size and on a 56k line it downloaded slowly. So step 1 was to learn HTML, I still have a lot of the books but many are no longer used except for reference but I still occasionally use HTML goodies by Joe Burns, Creating Killer Web pages by Siegel and Dynamic html by Jeff Rouyer ( htmlguru.com ). More recently I have used several tomes on CSS XHTML etc. the best so far seems to have been HTML Utopia: Designing without tables using CSS. It is also worth looking for a book on PHP5 and MYSQL, these have been recently released and together provide faster database access where that is needed. The latest release of MySQL also supports stored procedures. ( So ignore the comments about CSS below!!)

The first site appeared on a Freeserve (now Wanadoo) personal web page. Shortly we moved to Blueyonder personal web-space and now we have our own ISP - more later.

Having played around and learnt a few things we decided that clean and simple was the way to go. After a while we had a few pages up and every time we added a page we had to go back and change the navigation - this involved visiting every page so we tried frames. Now frames are OK but you can get yourself in a real mess. Also armed with our newly learnt Dynamic HTML we added a few bells and whistles - now they have gone missing in favour of a simpler clearer approach. Pretty soon we were up to 25 pages and needed some way to make it all hang together and look the same. CSS - no thanks!!

About this time I met a guy called Steve Evans - he was developing a web authoring tool called Pageblender.

Now Pageblender did what I wanted but be warned - you do need to know your html (but html is easy to learn). It allows you to set the outline of a page and effectively drop in the content. It allows you to re-use data through include files and also allows you to use logic elements to decide what to do. We use these to provide the different colour bars on the different types of pages we have.

Another one of the great things that you can do is create tables from an input list you stick your lines in with the elements separated by a pipe symbol and out comes a table, you can have alternate coloured lines and you can sort the entries (leaving out the heading line) so you can easily add lines of data and still have them come out in the same order. Steve has now written an import section that allows you to create one of these grids from comma delimited data - e.g.as from and excel spread sheet.

You can also use the many shortcuts and tags to input and format information. Go to the site for more info. Anyway with Pageblender the site management became easier the site now varies between 100 and 120 pages ( but it's growing all the time). If I add a page I add it to the include file for the navigation and regenerate the whole site - this takes around 40 seconds first time but around 10 -20 seconds for subsequent generates. The upload takes considerably longer.

In 2001 we decided that the site really ought to provide some support to the business so we looked around for hosting, shop software and an ability to take payments on the web. Hosting was solved by another contact and the fact that shop software was all bit the same, quite expensive and not that easy to use (from a developer point of view). So we had decided to go our own way for free! A quick self taught course in PHP gave us the necessary and along with MySQL is what we use today. I have a number of books on PHP and they vary in quality but Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL was one of the first. It is available from Amazon

We already had a merchant account with Barclays Merchant Services - but this limits to Customer not present, to upgrade to web capability was an enormous step in costs and we decided just too large. The alternative was to collect information securely on the web and use a service like Paypal. In the end we decided to do both when quite by chance we came across Longhair Technologies and their Emart Cart service. Emart cart is available as a free service that allows you to create paypal enabled buttons and pages. It's a bit rigid and didn't suit us but not being one to give up I asked if I could generate the button code on the fly and they said yes. So now we have a database or two which contain all the details of our products pricing etc. The database is driven from PHP scripts and generate the product pages on the fly. Clicking a button generates a link to emart with all the necessary info and they do the cart bit, collect the data and pay via paypal. There is also a facility to securely collect credit card details, these remain on their secure server and can be accessed by the customer (you have to pay for this service.) Since then we have added functionality to our web pages one of which is to serve different greetings pages, that display info on latest product upgrades etc. Our new gallery upload is also php driven and database stored as are the links, tips and what's on pages.

The development of a site this size with the PHP would have been a nightmare without Pageblender which in addition to its own and html tags highlights other code - like PHP, Vbscript etc.

The site has grown a bit - just like topsy, it has also widened it's appeal and we now regularly get between 4 and 500 hits a day with peaks of over 900. The content is a mix of my own, of submissions and of copy articles where their owners have been gracious enough to allow. We hope that the site is a real resource for the model boating community worldwide, but at the end of the day it is Pageblender that allows us to manage it! So Thanks to Steve for a wonderful tool.