WWW pages of the past (July 2002)

Along with my design tips page, I've never much liked my main home page. I feel it is too cluttered, and has grown too large to properly maintain. Thus I've based the new home page on the new design page. Here's a draft:

You can see that the new page has much more colour, and is thus more interesting to look at. It is also scalable, from 640-pixel width, up to over 1024-pixel width. This is important as the page will still view well on the lowest resolution monitor. The previous home page (see below) had a fixed width of 720 pixels. It thus can be viewed well at 800x600, but is too small for 1024-pixel width, and too large at 640-pixel width (the Goldilocks syndrome!). The other problem with this page is that there are lots of redundant information such as the School of Computing link, Napier link, and lots of old information in the central column of the page. There is also too many graphics, which do not integrated well.

An important factor in the design is the compatability between Internet Explorer and NetScape. Most users use Internet Explorer, but there are still quite a number of users who still use NetScape, especially in academia. Thus here is the home page in both Internet Explorer and NetScape:

and in NetScape:

You can see that the pages are displayed almost in the same form (although, as usual Internet Explorer has a slighted improved format).