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This is the second evolution of the CHR website since we first dipped
our toe into the online world a few years ago. Firstly, we
must take this opportunity to thank Jonathan Carrol and Lewis
Gowers from what was then Tankbay Internet Services for setting
up the
old site. Lewis and Jonathan left
us to design the layout (which was done in Notepad!), but led
the development of what was then our first online library database.
Very kindly, they also hosted the site for us at cost. Earlier
this year, with the continued support of Jonathan and
his new venture,
Vehicle Intelligence,
our site was re-hosted to a newer platform, somewhere in
Gloucestershire!
In early 2003 we decided that the site was showing it's age. It had
become difficult to maintain/update and it didn't reflect
our new "corporate
style". We had a number of final year student projects running
in Multimedia Technology and
Design within the Department
of Electronics at The University
of Kent, and we used the
results of these to guide us in designing our new site. Thanks go to the students whose ideas have been merged
into what you see now.
Our new website was written in-house using
Macromedia's Dreamweaver.
The site uses a combination of HTML, ASP and SQL - all
generated by Dreamweaver. That said, Dreamweaver is limited
in what it can write itself, so the standard code has been
modified (all over the place!) and added-to in a variety
of places to get the results that we wanted. We've made
a lot of use of dynamic pages, so we can now modify information
much faster.
The release of this website sees a new milestone for CHR, namely moving our library database fully on-line. Although
we keep a backup off-line at the studios (for when Trustnet falls over!), the live copy is now held on-line. This
enables us to add records remotely, rather than having to sit in the library. Hopefully this will improve the
speed at which we can get the 12" vinyl and CD's onto the system!
We hope you enjoy looking around our site. If you find anything wrong/broken (or right!), please
let us know.
As with all sites, this one will evolve and we'll probably borrow some ideas from elsewhere.
If you have any suggestions, we'd be very happy to hear from you.
Malcolm Phillips
December 2003 |
