Are you seeing the latest edition?

We hear quite often of visitors to our website who don't notice any change in our front page for a week or more at a time. The site is updated, typically, three times a week or more, so something is obviously quite wrong!

What is more than likely to be the problem is that your browser is showing you a copy of the page which is stored on your hard drive. Internet Explorer (for some reason) doesn't automatically get the latest version of the page from any web server by default, but looks instead for copy filed in your computer's temporary internet folder made during a previous visit. It's often unclear how frequently such a record is updated! Well, you can do something about this, and can instruct your Internet Explorer ALWAYS to download the latest version of the page from the server. You do this as follows:

Open Internet Explorer (you should be using version 8. If you are not, download the latest version from here. You can find out which version you are using by clicking Help/About Internet Explorer).

1. Click Tools/InternetOptions
2. In the Temporary Internet Files section, click Settings
3. Click the radio button next to Every Visit To The Page
4. Click OK, then OK again.

We have tried to ensure that the website visitors who use Firefox will also see the site as it was intended to be seen.

Can't get rid of horizontal scrollbars?

This website has been designed to be viewed on computers which have a screen capable of showing a picture measuring 1024 by 768 pixels. Statistics published in January 2009 established that, worldwide, 60% of computers used a screen resolution of this size or greater. On these displays (or larger) there should never be any horizontal scrollbars.

If you use a screen resolution smaller than 1024 by 768, you will certainly see horizontal scrollbars.

Got rather funny-looking colours?

This website has been designed to be viewed on computers which have a screen capable of showing at least 24bpp (bits per pixel). This is a technical term which means that the colour rendition is pretty good. In fact, this site looks even better at 32bpp (which is the standard achieved by the better video cards in modern computers). So, if your colour is a bit blotchy, or if shading appears patchy, this could mean that your computer is not geared up to 24bpp. Basically, 24bpp will give you something almost as good as a colour photograph, and 32bpp will actually be at least as good as a colour photograph.

Printing

Like most websites, the pages of this one are not capable of being printed on A4 paper on a conventional inkjet printer in portrait format. If you try to arrange for such a printing, most users will find that the print is incomplete (typically, the right hand edge of the page is not printed). The solution is to print the site in landscape format. If you don't believe us (!), a famous and popular site which also displays this property is http://www.bbc.co.uk.

There are printers on the market which have software which enables the website page to be compressd slightly, so that the entire width can be reproduced on an A4 portrait sheet of paper. Some distortion (particularly of images) may occur during the printing process. Internet Explorer 7 introduced printing compresssion for the first time independently of printers. If you haven't got this on your computer, you can download the file if you go here.

Viewing Problems

If you are experiencing difficulties in seeing the site, we would like to help.

Firstly, please check that you are looking at the site using Internet Explorer 8, and that the resolution on your computer screen is at least 1024 x 768 pixels. If you satisfy these requirements, please and explain what your difficulty is: we will try to reply quickly to help you.

We're asked sometimes why we don't support other browsers. The answer is that we do! However, the site is produced free of charge, gratis and for nothing (the webmaster would hesitate to call it a labour of love) and it would take far too much time to ensure that everything worked perfectly in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera (to name but three). Internet Explorer is the browser used by 80% of world-wide webbers, so we stick to that. However, most of the site appears as designed in other browsers too (particularly Firefox).