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About our site
www.stcuthbertshouse.com is us
We hope our website conveys something of our heart...we've put it together ourselves, rather than have some swishy web design agency do it for us (or TO us!), so it's really home-grown, and home-baked... Most of it was originally prepared late into the night, after a long day onsite with the builders...and I'm still correcting the odd mistake I find from those long nights.
Almost all of the photographs around the site are ones we've taken ourselves. The pictures of puffins were taken by our friend Wayne Geater, and we're grateful to him for letting us use them. You can see more of Wayne's pictures on his site which is here and in our Guest Gallery which is here.
On the techy side, we're committed to standards-based web design. So we started with some standards-compliant css-based code courtesy of Adrian Senior (who has his own site here; and who has gone more than the extra mile to help me when I reached the limit of my understanding...) and CommunityMX and worked up from there. The validation links we've included in the footer should sing a happy song if you have inclination to test them, and if you're browsing our site using a screen-reader or other accessibility aids, we'd be really pleased to hear your comments. Especially if they're gracious ones. We hope that alt tags and title tags have been correctly applied... If you find something which is broken or missing or doesn't work as it should, then please let us know.
Those really cool scrolling panels (check out the home page, and on the Guest Comments page) were inserted using a lovely plugin called Vertical Scroller Magic from Projectseven. We looked at loads of cool gizmos for our website, but avoided most of them because of their 'standards non-compliance'. So we were delighted to find some clever programmers who could achieve something so elegant and yet work to W3C standards.
Another Projectseven gizmo - Image Rotator Magic - powers those beautifully elegant 'fading picture' panels in the header and footer areas - again, all with clean code, using no Flash. Very cool.
The same is true of the Lightbox plugin, which creates a really elegant effect when you click on (almost) any picture on the site, and yet qualifies as 'unobtrusive' code. We used this version, because it's accessible via mouse or keyboard.
Important note: our website can only be viewed with a computer. If you're having trouble, please check you have one.
So we hope you enjoy the site, we hope you enjoy Northumberland, and we hope you will come to enjoy St Cuthberts House.
