Morrison-Enterprise

Background

This is primarily a marker page for Morrison-Enterprise, although, as you will see, it does also contain some of my thoughts and ramblings on the subject of the Web, HTML and other 'net' related things. I wonder if Tim Berners-Lee realised just what he was creating that day at CERN?

At the moment, Web Page design, is merely a hobby, though, it may become a source of alternative employment for myself once I decide to leave the offshore oil support industry and re-join the 'Real' world!

The menu on the left contains links to informative pages and pages that I have designed for my wife's business and my own domain.

History

My first web page was a personal page on Compuserve's "Ourworld" (whatever happened to Compuserve?) Armed with only rudimentary knowledge and, what transpired to be, a web designing programme that produced unbelievably bad code, I proceeded to make my mark on the web. That page is still out there in cyber-space somewhere, eternally hopeful that 1999 will bring a new update!

Alas, the Compuserve page waits in vain for an update as, in late 1999, I moved to a new ISP, complete with, what at the time was an awesome, 10Mb of free web space. By this time I had, quite logically I felt, dumped the afore mentioned authoring program and started to write code by hand in a simple text editor. Gone from the new web page were some of the "bells and whistles" that had been used previously "because I could" and I like to think at that point "content" became more important than how good it looked on Internet Explorer X.X

I continued with that ISP until 2002, when I made, what was for me the big step, of buying my own domain name, the 'morrison.uk.net' domain that you are browsing at the moment. Being the proud possessor of my own domain name, I had a look around for some-one to host it with. For some (ultimately illogical, considering the global nature of the web) reason I decided to stay with a UK based hosting company and found the one that I felt gave the best features for my chosen budget. Which, I still feel is the best way of doing it.
1. Identify how much you want to spend either per month or per year,
(in my case it was £50.00 per year.)
2. Identify any particular features that you may specifically want, (if you aren't SURE about a feature, include it anyway!)
(in my case it was Linux or Unix hosting, with PHP support and MySQL databases)
3. Then compare the other features of available packages that are in your price range and have the things that you definitely need.
At the very least this method should bring you a reasonable short-list unless your demands are minimal, in which case the list may still be quite extensive.

Now

I now use a nice little free web authoring program, which has a limited amount of automated features for inserting code, but I still prefer to do most of it manually. I have previously experimented with pages that use 'frames' to control the page layout (not really a good idea), 'tables' (which are a bit better and have wider support) and now, (like this page, for example) Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The style sheet option is, in my mind, the most elegant solution, though it can still produce the odd unexpected result!

I'm concentrating largely on producing code that passes verification tests on HTML and CSS standards (hence the two links at the foot of this page) It still comes as a surprise to me that major browsers manage to render pages correctly even with bad code, a fact that is a bit of a double-edged sword. Forgiving browsers allow novices to get the results they want easily, but they also almost encourage the proliferation of bad code. It's very easy to get caught in the 'Internet Explorer' trap and forget that, although used by perhaps 90% of the surfing public, writing code specifically for it can alienate a significant proportion of your potential visitors, a proportion that is growing daily with the success of other browsers, Mozilla Firefox for example.

The Future

Having been with my current hosting company for over three years, I am now looking at other hosts. I may even, perhaps, consider a 're-seller' account, where I can then sell on web space and services to my own clients. To do that successfully I need to improve my efficiency and abilities to produce sharp, smart, elegant and compliant code. One advantage of that is then, unlike the pages here, I would only have to concentrate on the code, not the 'flowery prose' as that would be supplied by the client!

Site Designed by:
Morrison Enterprise