Website Development

No form of endorsement or otherwise is given here, but these resources could be very useful if you wish to set up your own website. You may of course contact this website for help and advice!

The Reffell Family History website makes extensive use of coding generously provided free by the online community. Whilst there has been considerable modifications to create the sites, thanks and acknowledgement for the original coding is made to the following people; Entheos, Dynamic Drive, Wyoming Web Design, 1-2-3-4, Free CSS Templates (1), Free CSS Templates (2), Veppa, Idut and Javascript Kit.

  • Adobe Creative Suite CS4 - Previously developed by Macromedia until acquisition by Adobe in 2005, this suite of web development tools - Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash - is the industry standard for the production of many websites, with a price that reflects this. Probably the market leader, now in its CS4 guise it also integrates effectively with the image manipulation program Photoshop. Each development tool can also be bought individually.
  • Lynda.com - Named after founder Lynda Weinman, this is a terrific site for training resources (both online and on CD-ROM/DVD) for many of the main web development programs; including all the Adobe products, Javascript, CSS and XHTML design and the Microsoft Office suite.
  • Ipswitch - It is sometimes more convenient to use a ftp (file transfer) client to upload files to website servers and Ipswitch WS FTR Pro is one of the best.
  • Web Page Maker - An all-in-one program that creates Internet-ready websites simply without any knowledge of HTML coding etc.
  • Search Engine Builder - This provides a search facility (as used on this website) to allow users to search for words and phrases and then displays the results with hyperlinks to the found pages. Although the program needs to be purchased, it provides a search facility without any advertisements being displayed, unlike the free web-based search engines.
  • FreeFoto - Images are an essential ingredient to any website. If used appropriately they can significantly add to the site appeal. FreeFoto.com provides the largest collection of free photographs for private non-commercial use on the Internet.
  • JAlbum - A completely free javascript-based program for the creation of photograph albums that can be put onto a CD or uploaded to a website. A number of different 'skins' are provided to give a range of album formats.
  • Web Album Generator - Another completely free program for the creation of photograph albums that can be put onto a CD or uploaded to a website. This is a very easy to use program that gives excellent results and is totally XHTM 1.0 strict compliant. It is used to create the Xtras galleries.
  • Favicon - (short for Favourites icon) is a feature that makes it possible to associate a logo or other small graphic with a web page, usually displayed next to the web site address. FavIcon from Pics is an easy to use online tool that can generate a favicon from a picture, logo or other graphic of any size & resolution.
  • W3C Validation - This is a web-based tool for validating that web pages met the W3C standards. Files can be uploaded for validation or web addresses can be used.
  • W3 Schools Online - A very comprehensive website that provides free tutorials from basic HTML and XHTML to advanced XML, SQL, databases, multimedia and WAP. The site also has a number of interactive pages to enable variations of code to be tried out and tested.