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Amateur Theatre WebsitesDateline: 25th September, 2005At the moment of writing, I am well into the process of checking all the links in our Amateur Theatre links library, which means that, in the last week, I have looked a considerable number of amateur theatre websites. It's been an interesting and, in many ways, a heartening experience. Here's a kind of interim report on my findings: A surprisingly large number of sites have vanished. I have not been satisfied with simply deleting those whsoe addresses come up with a 404 page-not-found error but have tried alternatives: where once the address gave "home.htm" as the homepage, I have tried "index.htm" or some other alternative; where the original was, for example, "www.somecompany.demon.co.uk", I have tried "www.somecompany.co.uk" or "org.uk" or something similar; I have even tried seach engines, usually coming up with the orginal address. This has led me to formulate the following advice for amateur group webmasters:
That takes care of vanishing or moved sites. What about the sites that still exist? I came across one site which had not been updated since 1998 and quite a number which had not been updated in the last few years. Most of these had details of the (at the time) current production on the front page. In some cases, there were pages deeper in the sites which are, no doubt, still current (where the society meets, where it performs, and so on), but an out of date front page discourages visitors from going any further and may even make them think that the society no longer exists. Even if they know that it does, they will not be encouraged to join. An out of date site is worse than no site, for it puts potential members off. If you don't intend to update the site on a regular basis, make sure that the content is timeless and do not have any indication of when it was created/updated. There are a fair number of sites which are hosted on the various free servers. While this is attractive financially, it has major drawbacks. With many of these the top part of the screen (or, in the case of Geocities, the right hand third) is filled with advertising. For those who prefer a 800x600 screen resolution, this means that, at most, the bottom quarter of the screen has the real content. A surfer in a hurry (and there are many of those) is likely to think, "O-ho, the site's gone!" and move on elsewhere. Screen resolution is important. A lot of template-based sites assume a screen resolution of 1024x768 pixels and use tables for layout whose measurements are given in pixels rather than percentages. The result is that anyone using a smaller resolution (like the 800x600 I prefer because it's easier on my eyes) have to do a lot of sideways scrolling. The way to test if this is happening with your site, is (for Windows) to go to START, then CONTROL PANEL, then DISPLAY, and click on the Settings tab. At bottom left you'll see a slider which will alter the screen resolution. Move it to the left and click OK. You will be asked if you want to keep this setting. Just say yes, for you can always change it later. You will then see what your site looks like at that setting. To return your screen to its original resolution, just follow the above instructions and put the slider back where to the setting it was at before you changed it. If you find that you have to sideways scroll at the lower setting, then many of your visitors will have to, too, and most won't like it. You can change it by changing the source code of your page - which is nowhere near as scary as it sounds! Just look for <table width => commands. If the figure after the equals sign is just a figure - as in <table width="1024">, then the figure refers to the number of pixels (the dots that make up the screen) and the table will fill a screen set at 1024 resolution. Simply change that figure to <table width="100%"> and it will fill the screen, no matter what the resolution. Simple! It's a little extra work initially, but it makes life easier for visitors. (All layout tables on the BTG are set in percentage terms: only those which contain a graphic within the main body of the page are declared in pixel terms, so if we have a photo on the page which is 150 pixels wide, the table which contains it will be declared as <table width="150">.) Next week we'll take a look at the design and content of the amateur sites we've looked at.
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