Design

It's possible to trace the development of the PC Technology Guide's design using the Wayback Machine, which has archived pctechguide.com (indeed, many of the Internet's major sites) since 1999. You can see that there have been essentially three main stages leading to the current site: the 1998 launch, a redesign in late 2001, and then the current site, launched in August 2006.

Early Designs

The 1998 original site was constructed using Microsoft FrontPage98, using one of the application's "themed" designs. FrontPage was at that time held in low regard by the newly emerging web design vanguard, who complained of the bloated HTML it created, and lack of originality in the designs. Whatever the merits of their arguments, as a tool it enabled people to produce websites and get them online. Anyone could do this, without having to resort to expensive web companies or courses in web technologies that were irrelevant to their field of interest. In many ways, FrontPage is the tool that allowed pctechguide.com to be born.

The redesign work in 2001 came after discussions between various new forum members - the forum which had been introduced earlier that year. This second design lasted for some five years, but wasn't static through that time, being gradually updated and modified, in particular altering column layout and adjusting menus.

In July 2004 there was a significant page design change which essentially broke the hefty length pages down into smaller units of information. The new interface proved far more flexible, and resulted in much faster page load times.

Moving to CSS Layout

A major Internet trend in the early years of the 21st Century was the increasing influence of the W3C on web designers and browser manufacturers. Taking this on board, when the site was redesigned through 2006 changes were made not only in terms of the navigation and appearance, but the site was also moved from an HTML table layout to XHTML and CSS design.

In pursuit of this, huge efforts were made to ensure the site was fully validated, but errors may still remain. There are links provided at the foot of every page straight to the W3C's validation tools for XHTML and CSS, which you are very welcome to use on any page. If errors are found, then we would be happy to hear about it.

Resolution

The site is designed at a fixed width that is best viewed at 1024x768 resolution and above. This resolution allows for the use of larger accompanying images and diagrams, particularly in the graphics rich tutorials. Statistics show that only a small proportion of the PC Technology Guide's visitors use resolutions below 1024x768, however, the layout was designed in such a way that much smaller resolutions can still easily view the site content, with only the minor distraction of a horizontal scrollbar.