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About Us Who we are and what we do |
This is where you write about your business/organisation. For example, you could:
Describe what you do - the products you make or services you provide
Say something about yourself and/or your staff - their skills and experience; how much they enjoy their work; how they love helping customers; etc.
Set out the history of your business/organisation and key stages in its development
Give your opening hours
Say where you are located
You can write as much as you need (detail below) and your text can be interspersed with photographs or other illustrations, if you wish.
A basis for expansion…
As your business/organisation develops, your starter.site can form the basis of a much larger website. The structure can be expanded to include additional pages and more advanced options: page groups (products; services; etc.); news pages with archives; slide-shows; error-handling pages; in fact, all the features on the sites we operate{1} can be built onto your starter.site structure.
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We’ve actually filled the remainder of this page with illustrations of the options you have when designing your page. If you’re not familiar with all the possibilities of web-page design this will be of interest.
Go to: Page Size • Page Layout and Formatting • Downloads • Technologies • Site Index • Layout and Content of Other Pages • Why have a ‘Links’ page? • Technical Limits • Copyright and legal liability
Page Size ∧
Your ‘page’ can be much larger than a normal paper page. The Internet is not constrained by physical paper sizes; the only limitation is the number of megabytes (Mb) needed to store your site. With careful site design (which we, of course, do) you can fit a great deal into a small space. Please see Technical Limits (below) for more detail.
So you can write as much as you are likely to want.
If you have more to say than you could fit on four sides of A4 paper you may need a more advanced solution than our starter.site. Please contact us and we’ll discuss with you the options for building a full multi-page site.
Page Layout and Formatting ∧
Go to: Colours • Images • Sub-Indexes
The Internet gives you a wide range of layout and formatting options. We’ve illustrated a few on this page. Note the use of headings and sub-headings, to signpost and break up the text. There are also the usual bold, italic, emphasised and underlined options, which can be combined if you wish.
Every option on this page is available to your for your starter.site.
Colours
Colour is important for your site and you have freedom to choose the colours of your starter.site. The colours used for this example site are intended to be eye-catching but are by no means the only options available. However, a bad choice of colours can be a problem for readers with impared eyesight, so be careful. We recommend you choose three or four colours, being:
the normal page background colour (e.g. white)
the normal text colour (e.g. black)
the menu-bar colour
the accent colour (used for headings and emphasis text)
Note that in this example site, the accent colour is the same as the menu-bar colour.
Note that there is no specific problem with using a colour other than white for the background colour, but you must consider carefully whether the colour you choose is compatible with any images you plan to include.
Images
Images are important. The Internet is a visual medium and users generally prefer contatn to be illustrated with well selected photographs, diagrams, charts and other illustrations. Subject to the Mb limits you can use as many, or as few images as you require. We can prepare images for you, but the cost of doing so is not included in the price of the starter.site.
Floating Images
Try this: change the size of the window in which you are viewing this page. See how, as you reduce the size, the text moves but the images remain on the right. This is called ‘floating’. We design pages for use on a 1024x768 screen, but we use floating images so that people with other screen sizes still see the page without having to scroll left and right. thumbnail images also help with this.
Thumbnails
The world, from space
To give users detail on an image you need sometimes to provide a fairly high-resolution image file, allowing users to zoom in to the detail they require. Users with slower Internet connections or limited bandwidth (including most users on St Helena) may not want to wait while a large image downloads, so for this we use a ‘thumbnail’. A lower resolution image is displayed when the user loads the page, but by clicking on the image the user can reveal the full resolution version.
The image on the right is a thumbnail, and you can test how it works.
Sub-Indexes
Note how all the level-one headings on this page are sub-indexed above. This helps your reader find things on your page.
Downloads ∧
You are welcome to include downloadable material on your starter.site, again limited only by the filespace available for your site. We will provide a link to each downloadable item, using your specified text. For example, Download an article about Google™. Any material can be made downloadable, though it is best if:
Documents are in .PDF format - not everyone has access to Microsoft Office™
Audio files are in .MP3 format, as this is the most widely used
Video files are in .FLV format, which normally produces the smallest filesize
We can convert files to these formats from many others, at a small additional charge.
Technologies ∧
Your starter.site can contain static HTML, animated .gif images and essential JavaScript. The image on the right is an animated .gif file and the text below is produced by Javascript, and tells the user the time on St Helena, irresepctive of where the user is in the world.
(This will also appear on your contacts page to help callers check whether you will be at work before they call.)
As a matter of style we recommend using dynamic content (such as animations) very sparingly, but we won’t interfere with your design. We can write specific JavaScripts and produce .gif files for you, but the cost of doing so is not included in the price of the starter.site.
We actually code your site in standard HTML (this site conforms to the XHTML 1.0 Transitional standard) so if you want to take over the maintenance of the site yourself you should be able to import it into any web builder application.
Site Index ∧
All good websites have a site index and your starter.site is no exception, even though the site has few pages. You can access the site index from the footer.
Layout and Content of Other Pages ∧
The layout and content of the About Us page is up to you. The content, though not the layout, of the pages Related Sites and Contact Us is also up to you. The layout and content of the other pages (Introduction, Important Information and Site Index) is largely fixed, though it is possible to add images to these pages if you wish.
Why have a ‘Links’ page? ∧
The Internet is designed as a library, and since its inception it has been the expectation of users that every site they visit will help them locate other sites with additional relevant content. That is also how search engines find much of their content (though we will actually formally register your starter.site with Google™, the leading search engine, so that you don’t have to wait while they discover you).
So to be a good Internet citizen, your starter.site has a ‘links’ page (Related Sites).
It’s up to you what links it contains, and the page in this example site contains a some suggestions. You might also consider:
If you have other businesses you may want to link to those
If your business uses any specific technologies, you might link to the relevant Wikipedia page so that your readers can learn more about that technology and how it works
There may be content that would be useful to your readers on the government website or another St Helena site.
And if you are really confident that your product or service is the best in its field, why not link to your competitors? Then your readers can see how much better you are!
You should also encourage others to link to you. We will automatically include your starter.site as a link from ours.
Technical Limits ∧
To keep the costs down your starter.site has a few technical limits. In our experience these provide ample scope for building an interesting and informative site. They are:
The total size of the site cannot exceed 50Mb: unless you want to include extraordinarily large images or downloadable long high-definition video or audio clips this will not be a problem. To give an example, all the Burgh House sites{1} together add up to around 30Mb.
No single file can exceed 10Mb: this is because the upload time for large files exceeds what the St Helena Internet connection can reliably deliver.
Due to bandwidth restrictions at our host you cannot stream audio or video from the site: though you can provide a link to video etc, hosted on another site, e.g. YouTube.
Copyright and legal liability ∧
This example website is copyright to us, as set out on the page Important Information.
your starter.site will be copyright to you and your copyright and acceptance of liability will be set out on the page Important Information, using the same wording.
You will be solely responsible for its content, so if anyone complains to us about what you have written we will direct them to you. Notwithstanding the foregoing, please also note that we reserve the right to decline to include on your starter.site any material which we deem to be illegal or improper.
Footnotes:
{1} Sites we operate include 
Burgh House, 
The Burgh House Kitchen, 
Burgh House Media Productions, 
Burgh House Software, 
Burgh House Training & Development and 
Saint Helena Island Info.