Update Sep 2007: Overall
the site hasn't changed all that much and the notes above are still
accurate on the whole. We simplified the site and took out some
unnecessary sections and features, and adding some others, such as
the drop-down lists accessible on each page. We're still using
Microsoft FrontPage 2003 to maintain the site, even though Microsoft
announced they will soon be withdrawing support for this product. I
tried the successor, Expression Web, and found that the absence of
the some features I have come to rely on in FrontPage, notably the
link bars and the ease of altering the navigation structure of the
site, is too great an obstacle to make the move now. Expression Web
is supposed to instill good design practice and better adherence to
standards, which FrontPage doesn't, so say the clever people. I
don't care too much about the esoteric aspects of web design and am
happy to stick with something that works for me, but I guess it's
unavoidable that I'll have to move to Expression Web at some point.
Designed and built exclusively by Harburton
Consulting Ltd i.e. Stefan, with content edited mainly by Ness. Most
of this section is technical info so for any non techies - switch
pages now!
For the technical amongst you, here's what we
(Stefan) did.
First off we did some research and looked at many
different travel related sites - both from those travelling and
those providing info, advice and services to travellers. This gave
us a feel for what we felt worked and what didn't and also some
hints on how to structure and design our own site. We've included
links to some of what we felt were the better sites (see our Links
section).
There seemed to be a definite pattern emerging
from the sites that contradicts the myth that world travellers are
all gap year students travelling on a minimum budget. It also seems
that people in the UK haven't yet got the bug as most of the sites
were from Holland, and Germany (or perhaps that's just Stefan's
nationality bias in his research!). Generally speaking the sites we
found were from a couple (married/engaged) who were off backpacking
for a year, having done some travelling before. "She" would have a
job not in IT, "he" would usually be an "IT consultant" but not an
out-and-out techie. Most of the copy was written
by the bloke writing in the plural on behalf of his partner...
How did we build the site?
Web design was totally new to us. It kept Stefan
occupied for more hours than Ness cares to remember and resulted in
some interesting entries on our Visa bills!
Web hosting provider
First off, you need somewhere to "host" your web site.
Buying your own server and looking after it is not an option for
most people. It is easier, cheaper and more convenient to "lease"
some space from someone else, a web hosting provider, on their
servers. The web hosting provider provides all the basic software,
including the web server, Apache in our case, and support, such as
backups and troubleshooting. There are many (many!) companies out
there provider a hosting service but after doing a bit of research
we settled on Aplus (www.aplus.net)
and chose their Solo XR plan, which provides a good level of disc
space and support for a wide range of tools for a low fee. There are
cheaper plans but Stefan was sceptical - many seemed to be
of the fly-by-night variety and you may end having to look around
for a new host before long. We found Aplus by searching Cnet
(www.cnet.com) figuring that they would be more likely to include
reputable suppliers. So far we have no complaints at all and would
certainly recommend Aplus. Caveat emptor all the same.
Web site construction
Advanced web designers will probably recommend
something like DreamWeaver but that just scared Stefan after one look
and we found Microsoft FrontPage 2003 easy to get to grips
with. It looks and feels like any other Microsoft Office product and
if you already know Word you won't have any trouble getting to grips
with FrontPage.
Web site design template
We bought a Dynamic Web Template from
Themesets.net (www.themesets.net)
At $55 per template it was a lot cheaper than paying
someone else to work up a design. Local web designers were going to
charge upwards of £500 for a noddy site and from £3000 (!) for a
site of a couple of pages, so that was a complete no-brainer (oops,
jargon!) DWT's seemed to be a good way to go if you want
to have flexibility. Provided you stick to a few basic rules you can
easily alter the whole look of your site with just a few clicks.
Other tools
The Forum and Picture Gallery were free
downloads. The Forum was built using phpBB v2.0 (www.phpbb.com).
The Picture Gallery was built using Gallery v1.4.4 (gallery.menalto.com).
Both the Forum and the Picture Gallery make use of PHP, which is
definitely worth getting to grips with.
Update Feb 2006: The forum was a magnet
for hackers and spammers, and as it was not really being used (i.e.
at all) we just ditched that section from our site.
The Blog was bought from Blog-City (www.blog-city.com).
Although Blog-City offer a free blog I decided to pay the
$2.50/month for the premium blog which gives you greater control
over your blog.
With only a little bit of fiddling, making sure
files were placed in the correct folders, all three were very
straightforward to install. Customising them took a little more
fiddling and required editing some of the configuration files. For
this we downloaded the Crimson Editor (www.crimsoneditor.com)
rather than rely on Notepad.
Initially
we started with the freebie chat room provided by our web host but
have now managed to replace that with BlaB! Lite (hot-things.net/blab_lite.php)
which was a doddle to install and is easy to use. We couldn't get
the alternative we looked at, php-openchat, to work.
The pictures themselves come from a variety of
sources but are basically just resized versions of the original
(mostly hi-res 1400x900) jpegs on our hard drive. Pre-world trip
pictures were taken
using our standard (non-digital) Pentax MZ-50 and scanned in using
our Nikon CoolScan V film scanner, a superb piece of kit (£500...)
For the world trip we bought a Pentax *ist DS camera, an outstanding
yet compact digital SLR. The benefit of this was that we could
continue to use our existing lenses (although there is a trade-off -
see elsewhere for that esoteric discussion). Later in the trip we
added a nice Sigma lens with a massive 1/2.8 aperture (huh?)
throughout the 18-50mm focal length (huh?) Latest addition to the
photography equipment was a stonking (1.2kg) 70-200mm f1/2.8 Sigma
lens, a replacement for the Pentax zoom lens that fell into a muddy
ditch in Laos and was never quite the same even after having it
cleaned in Hanoi.
