For
the anoraks and nerds out there...
About
our web site
Construction.
Our
site is designed and built on our local machine using Dreamweaver
web site authoring software from Macromedia; in our opinion the
best that money can buy. This gives us the ability to fine tune
and test changes locally before publishing to the internet, ensuring
that our visitors always see a complete site without empty, fragmented
or unreachable pages.
Images.
Our images are optimised in Gimp to ensure fast page loading without
html resizing.
Bandwidth
economy and speed.
We know how exasperating it is having to wait ages for pages to
load on some web sites, even with a high speed broadband connection.
For this reason we take great care to fine tune OurFrance.net
to maximise content whilst minimising page load times.
Tweaking
and testing.
After
tweaking locally we manually scrutinise the html code of each
page to clean up empty and redundant tags. Then we make a final
analysis of all our pages at: http://tools.pingdom.com.
A recent test of our home page is HERE.
Feel free to copy the URL of any of our pages and
test them at pingdom.com.
If you are not impressed with the results please do contact us
and we will do our best to shave a few more milliseconds off the
page load times.
Browsers,
resolution and aspect ratio.
We examine every one of our pages in all popular browsers, all
resolutions and aspect ratios in order to ensure that you see
our pages as we intend them to be seen, no-matter which browser,
monitor or resolution you use.
Search
engines. (SEO)
We are meticulous with our search engine optimisation (SEO) ...
test it for yourself, type the word: ourfrance into Google,
Yahoo
or any of the other major search engines. Or if you
think that the word 'ourfrance' is too obscure to to be used on
many web sites (therefore giving us a high ranking) try a collection
of three or four main towns in our area, for instance: Montreuil
Fruges Boulogne, you will find us in a good position
on page one.
Styles.
All our pages use embedded style sheets that are easily recognisable
by any browser. We create the styles in our master template and
they are automatically inherited by all our html pages, ensuring
all are interoperable and up to date. This results in style continuity
(fonts, margins, layout, links, menus, colours etc.) being constantly
maintained throughout our site. However, although all our pages
have been tested at W3C
CSS Validation Service we only display the validation
icon in the left sidebar of our homepage and this page. Here's
a LINK
to validate this page. Alternatively if you wish you can validate
our homepage.
Language.
As our web site is primarily for English language speakers most
of our pages are constructed using only the English language.
Having text in more than one language on the same page, especially
on the homepage, is not only perplexing for the visitor, but also
confuses the search engines (thereby reducing page ranking). It
is with this in mind that we are currently working on a 'mirror'
site for those who wish to view our web site in French.
Comments
and suggestions.
We welcome any comments or suggestions regarding content and/or
layout. If you wish to let us know how we are doing, or how we
may develop the site further, please send us a message from the
contact page.
Thank
you for visiting our site.
