About the CHR website

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.