Finding your way around

Hopefully the structure of this website should make it easy to find what you are looking for. If you can't you can try the site map which lists every section of the site. If you still have problems then send me an email.

Plans for the website

Currently the information on this new site is much as it was on the old site. However over the next few months this will change considerably. It is my intention that this site becomes a repository of useful information for the voluntary and Community Sector in Bradford. Information will be directly presented on the web pages themselves rather than visitors having to download a document before they can read it (information will still be available for download as well of course).

New features of the website will be highlighted on the home page and in the change log. The change log will also have a record of smaller and more 'back-end' changes - for those of you who might be interested in such things!

Some notes on web browsers

A web browser is a piece of software (a computer program) that allows you to 'browse' or 'surf' the world wide web. Since most of you are, no doubt, using the Microsoft Windows operating system you are also probably using Internet Explorer to do your browsing.

I said above that this website should display on any 'standards compliant browser' - meaning a browser that attempts to implement the code of a website as the W3C specify the code should be implemented. All browsers vary in their level of compliance with the W3C standards. Unfortunately Internet Explorer is probably the poorest popular web browser for standards compliance. This has meant that I have had to write a significant number of 'fixes' to get the site to display more-or-less properly on Internet Explorer. If you are using Internet Explorer version 6 or later you should be fine (if you notice any problems with the site you may want to report them). However if you want to see the site exactly as intended then I suggest that you download, install and use a better web browser. In fact you should do this anyway as far as I'm concerned!

Two browsers that I would recommend are Mozilla Firefox and Opera. Both are free. Both have good accessibility options and can be customised to suit your needs. Firefox has the added bonus of being 'open-source' meaning that anybody can look at the code of the program and help make it better by writing improvements. If you're using an Apple computer then Safari should also display the pages correctly (but again let me know if there any glitches).

I'm very pleased to say that the latest version of Internet Explorer seems to be as good as Firefox and Opera at standards compliance. The latest release - Internet Exporer 8 release candidate 1 - displays this site as intended. Well done MicroSoft! Finally! (I'd still use a different browser personally though!)

Style sheets

This website currently has a main stylesheet for viewing on a monitor (main_style.css) and a stylesheet for printing that strips out the menus and colour information (print.css). I will add further style sheets to make the pages display properly on hand-held devices such as mobile phones, etc. Keep an eye on the change log.