Your Monitor:

Your screen's resolution will affect how much scrolling you have to do when viewing web sites. The most common screen resolution is 800 x 600 and consequently most web sites are currently built for this resolution.

If you find you are having to scroll left to right then your monitor is probably set to 600 x 400. If you have a large monitor you may be set to 1000 x 800 in which case sites will either sit left, leaving space to the right, or will spread across the screen depending on how they were constructed.

As we construct your web site we will ask you to check regularly and it would be best if your monitor was set to 800 x 600:

On PC:
From your Start Menu choose Settings
Click on Control Panel
Click on the Display icon
When it opens up click the Settings tab
Move the slider to 800 x 600
Click Apply/OK

On Mac:
Use your Control Strip

You should relay this information to any friends/clients who complain of having to scroll.

Colour:

Most web sites now use many more colours than the 256 of a few years ago. Please make sure you monitor is set to thousands or millions of colours. Follow the procedure above and select 'true colour' on PC or 'millions of colours' on Mac. If graduations looked banded then your display is set to 256 colours.

Text:

The size of the text can be varied in some browsers - as the text is made larger the page graphics will be pushed around. Your site will be built with this in mind but while reviewing the site it would be best to set your text to the 'normal' size.

For example in Internet Explorer:
Choose the View menu
Select Text Zoom
Choose 100%

Cache:

Browsers cache (store) material they download from the internet to access it more quickly next time you visit the site. This can be a problem while the pages of your site are undergoing changes - you may be wondering why you can't see any changes, but in fact your computer is looking at an old version of the page.

You'll need to clear your cache before viewing updated pages:

On PC:
Go to your Tools menu
Select Internet Options
Click the General tab
Check the Delete all Offline Content box
Click the Delete Files button
Click OK

On Mac:
Edit menu>Preferences>Advanced>Empty Cache

Email:

With your new domain e.g mydomain.com you can create your own email addresses e.g sales@mydomain.com. This will be different to the email address supplied by your ISP (the company connecting you to the Internet e.g Bigpond, AOL). We will forward any emails addressed to whatever@mydomain.com to your ISP and you can download them in the usual manner.

You will from time to time change your ISP resulting in a new email address, but if your clients have been using the whatever@mydomain.com email address, they won't need to change anything. We need only alter the forwarding of your mydomain.com emails to your new ISP.

To maintain consistency of email address as far as your client is concerned it's important that the emails YOU SEND appear to come from mydomain.com rather than the email address the ISP has given you. You need to set this up in the email program you use e.g Outlook Express.

The method for Outlook Express (PC) is:
Go to the Tools menu and choose Accounts
Click on Mail
Choose the account for your current ISP (you will have set this up with the help of your ISP)
Click on Properties
Enter your mydomain.com email address in the relevant box
Click Apply/OK
Name the account suitably.

Your emails will now come from the mydomain.com address.

If you have more than one domain you will need to set up an account for each domain:
Once you've set up the first domain click Add
Choose Mail
The wizard will guide you through entering your name, email address (e.g sales@mydomain2.com) and the server info (pop & smtp which you can get by looking at the Properties of your first email account, assuming you aren't using a different server for this domain)
Click Finish

Now when you create an email you'll be able to choose from the drop down menu on the To box, the address you wish to send the email from.

Browsers:

A browser is the program your computer uses to 'view' the internet e.g Internet Explorer or Netscape. Internet Explorer is now the most popular. Most web sites are built for browsers from version 4 onwards, though our web sites should display correctly in older browsers as well.

The latest versions of the browsers include the recent plug-ins like Flash (earlier versions needed the plug-in installed separately).

Make sure you have the latest version of the browser. Download it from:

Internet Explorer:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie

Netscape:
http://browser.netscape.com

FireFox:
http://www.mozilla.com

General:

The internet consists of a network of computers (servers) all over the world. When someone views your site they are being routed through quite a complex path.

Depending on various factors, including the number of people using the internet, the path can become congested and your site may not download. As your site is hosted on a reliable server, it's non appearance is almost certainly due to external circumstances, and if someone says they couldn't access your site, just tell them to try again later - it was there, but their path was temporarily congested.

You should make sure to include your web site address and related email address on all your correspondence and printed material.

Feel free to contact us if you have any further questions.