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Web Development

Introduction

I have worked on web sites since 1995 when I started on my very own one at Southampton University. This work has included:

  • HTML: Used to display my final year project report
  • DHTML: For some of my university coursework and then on early versions of St Mary's Village Carnival and cdmUK.com websites
  • Microsoft FrontPage web authoring: For my original MadTech / TheoGray.com website
  • Active Server Pages (ASP): A number of the websites I look after still run some ASP code. Original functionality in cdmUK.com included a large amount of complex ASP for document generation and other interesting features.
  • XHTML / Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): Progressed through early times of just using CSS for basic styles, to using CSS for layout as much as possible in recent decades.
  • Macromedia/Adobe Flash: Used for photograph albums and to create the Horizon Bathrooms brochure site from a template.
  • Microsoft .Net ASPX, MVC, Core: In more recent decades I've been developing websites in .Net and still support a number of .Net Framework 4.x sites in VB.Net and C#, plus more recent ones now on .Net Core / .Net 5 & .Net 6.
  • Umbraco: The majority of new websites I create require content management features, for which I currently support Umbraco v4, v7 and v8 sites while I get more experience with Umbraco v9 and start to upgrade older sites.

Current Web Showcase

My current web showcase includes:

HTML / DHTML / Microsoft FrontPage

In 1995, I began creating websites from static HTML written in a basic text editor. With university coursework, came the use of DHTML to a small extent (unfortunately most of that only worked under Netscape 4), and for a number of years the majority of my work was delivered to the browser as static HTML. At that time, I didn't find many occasions to use DHTML, except for the usual picture swapping when a user moves over a picture button (which was the only part of my CM300 coursework* (See Note Below) which worked on all JavaScript 1.1 enabled browsers!) and the menus used on early St Mary's Village Carnival and similar websites.

Working at Ai Solutions, I was gradually drawn in to some of the nice features of Microsoft FrontPage, such as their common borders and navigation features which you can see hard at work on my original site* (See Note Below).

* Note: Unfortunately my old ISP has informed me that they will no longer host FrontPage webs for free after 12-Dec-03, so these marked links may not work after that date.

Active Server Pages

I began using Active Server Pages (Classic ASP) for web authoring through a need to display dynamic content from the server. Other options were considered, such as CGI, PERL, JSP, etc., but with my knowledge of Visual Basic, then server side VBScript seemed the obvious answer.

Microsoft Visual Studio.NET became my development environment of choice through the many years that I developed websites using ASP. Due to time limitations (and the fact they still work well), a number of the websites I support still run on (Classic) ASP.

XHTML / Cascading Style Sheets

Having used CSS for styles for a number few years, as CSS for layout became more popular, I got very interested in the possibilities, especially with the release of various useful books and the CSS Zen Garden. As an example, click here to see what this page really looks like underneath when viewed with just the XHTML and no styling.

Initially it was a bit of a slog to get everything working across various browsers such as IE5, IE6, Pocket IE, and Mozilla 1.6 to Firefox 1.0, but sites like the W3C validators were useful at the time. With Microsoft retiring support for IE and more modern browsers supporting standards so much better, plus the advent of Bootstrap and similar fully-tested frameworks, then working with CSS is much simpler these days and I can focus on the interesting tweaks rather than the underlying structure.

Macromedia/Adobe Flash

While Flash was still popular, I dabbled with it over the years, including using the Slide Show Pro component on various sites, but never had to do much serious work with it until Horizon Bathrooms approached me to provide a brochure website from a Flash template.

I would not class myself as a Flash developer, as I am still much more comfortable using XHTML/CSS and Javascript to produce a good looking website, whether from a template or scratch. But having had the opportunity to work with Flash, I felt confident to work with Flash templates to integrate customer content or to update existing websites.