^April 2001 …current site>

I’ve been building websites since about 1996. My wife, Janet, was starting up her business selling her dollshouse needlepoint kits at craft shows and one day I sat down at our stand with a piece of paper and some html code that I’d coppied from someone’s website. “That bit must be how that paragraph fits there, that must be how they put a picture on the page…” and so I worked out how to code pages by hand. We soon had our own website, complete with rainbow-coloured stripes and spinning logos, as was the trend in those days (!) Now, after 28 years, the shop on that site is closing down, but the information pages will live on a bit longer…

So this section is about my work and some of my current sites that I work on nowadays.

I used the same few tools for most of those early years:

I used to use Homesite v1.2 at first, which was freeware, back in 1996 when I started, but isn’t free any more – Adobe took it over and stated charging for it, then dropped it in 2009. I occasionally used HTML kit for a while, then took to using Dreamweaver 8 (which is old software, but it still works, and I used to use it for static html sites for quite a long time. I couldn’t justify spending the hundreds to upgrade to the current version though!). More recently, I switched to using the (free) Bluegriffon, but nowadays I don’t have any need to work on static html sites, so WordPress is all I use.

Images are still prepared using Paintshop Pro v6.00 (by JASC, who sold out to Corel. See Corel Paintshop Pro). If I need a transparent png I use Corel Paintshop Pro X2, but  PSP 6 is so simple, as it loads quickly and does almost all I need.

The stylesheets were written using Topstyle Lite v 3.5 (now see Lite v3.10 (freeware), or buy v5), or Dreamweaver, of course.

To ftp files to the server, I used to use Filezilla but now prefer WinSCP. (Dreamweaver also had uploading built in, which was more convenient (when it worked!)).

These days, though, I build almost everything using WordPress.

Anything else you’d like to know – just email me, and I’ll try to give you an answer.

Finally – if you need a website designed for a very reasonable fee – try me 🙂