Derbyshire butterflies was designed with ease of use and cross browser compatibility in mind. Hence there are no annoying popups and contains a single easy to use menu. The only popups used are to display larger sized images from thumbnails. Flash has been reduced to a bare minimum (2 .swf currently).
The target audience is essentially everybody with an interest in the butterflies of Derbyshire or butterflies in general and their conservation needs. This includes those just wanting desktop wallpapers. The textual information will not be too stodgy or boring (this part has not been completed yet.
Desktop wallpapers are given as 8-bit .bmp files which give a higher quality than .jpeg files - no compression artefacts - and are of a popular monitor size (1280/1024) for 17 - 19 inch monitors, and give a file size in the range of 3.5 - 4.5Mb. Since windows bitmap files are suitable for compression, in all cases these have been compressed with WinRAR by up to 50%. This decreases download times and reduces server space.
Server hosting is provided by WiserHosting which combine a comparatively large web space for the fee but with a bandwidth restriction of 6Gb per month. Derbyshire butterflies in no way reaches that volume currently. Previously, this web space was occupied by my personal web site which i may run concurrently with derbyshire butterflies in the future depending on work constraints. In that, URL's www.derbyshire-butterflies.co.uk and www.marknowak.co.uk lead to the same site. The latter being the hosts nameserver, with the former simply redirected to the latter.
META tags are used to aid search engine robots in site indexing. Otherwise no other site promotion has been employed.
Software used is as follows -
- Windows XP Professional
- Macromedia Dreamweaver MX - HTML page design
- Macromedia Flash MX - the flash animation - obviously
- Adobe Photoshop CS2 - all image editing
- BreezeBrowser 2.11 - RAW file image conversion 2003 - 2005
- Phase one - Capture One Pro - image conversion 2005 onwards
- Notepad - some hand written code
