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TECHNICAL AND LEGALS
Ben & Jack's Fantastic Homepage is a family homepage, created and published in the spirit of friendship and education for which the WorldWideWeb should exist.

We welcome visits to the page and correspondence from like minded, good hearted people of any race, creed or orientation, anywhere on Earth.

PUTTING OUR BANNER ON YOUR SITE

If you'd like to add this animated Ben and Jack's Fantastic Homepage banner to your site, which will then enable your visitors to click straight to us, copy and paste the HTML in the texfield below into the code for your page.

The banner is the standard industry dimensions of 468x60 pixels, and is 20K in size.

HOW WE DO IT
The page is still, at present, mainly created by Laurence, though the boys are starting to take an interest.

We work on Apple Macs with G3 processors. We use a digital camcorder inputting directly into the Mac to grab digital snaps, or scan in photographic prints of family snaps.

When we started out back in 1995, we learned to build a site from Elizabeth Castro's excellent books 'HTML for the World Wide Web', which are published by Peachpit Press (http://www.peachpit.com) under the Visual Quickstart Guide imprint. If you work on the Mac platform, we can't reccommend them highly enough. Now, though, of course, everything has move don so much that a little HTML scarcely seems enough to get buy on.

For a long time we didn't use a Webpage editor at all, coding HTML directly as a Simple Text document. Now, however, we let Dreamweaver take care of the donkey work and just correct its code as we need to. Our graphics are created using Adobe Photoshop, and crunched down to size using Fireworks. We like animated gifs, despite their fall from popularity, and ours are done 'stop frame', with either Fireworks or GifBuilder. Our sound files are usually recorded directly onto the Mac and manipulated using SoundApp.

We browse the Web ourselves through IE 5. We do, however, attempt to code the site so that both browsers display it as it should be seen, whether you are visiting from another Mac or from a PC.

CREDITS AND COPYRIGHTS

Although most of the things you see on the site have been created by us, we did steal one or two particularly nice things from other people.

The animated Union Jack flag, which flies as part of our banner, was created by Dorling Kindersley. We borrowed it without asking and copyright in it rests with them.

Similarly, the human skeleton which Jack stands in front of on the 'Favourite Places' page was lifted from Dorling Kindersley's 'The Ultimate Human Body', and its copyright rests with DK.

The logos of all the places listed on the 'Favourite Places' pages are copyright to the relevant institutions. The links on that page are in no way commercially backed. These are simply places the boys like going to.

You will notice a small ad button on the lower left of each page of our site. It's placed there by Hitbox, whose excellent free service provides our site stats to us.

The site is served from Telewest's Blueyonder user area

WARNING
You are welcome to lift things you like from our page, providing they contain no image of any person.

Please respect that this is really just a family album, and that Ben and Jack are our kids. We reserve our rights to institute proceedings, under UK jurisdiction, against anybody who appropriates images of any person from this site, regardless of whether or not they are republished elsewhere.

MAKING YOUR OWN HOMEPAGE

It's easy, and like with most things the best way to get started is to get a book, sit down at the computer and just do it. All you need are your browser, a text editor (word processing package) or Web Page editor, and the patience to fiddle.

The browser menu-bar item 'VIEW' offers an option called 'Source'. If you hit that while visiting any Web Page, your computer will deliver you the HTML code for that page, just as if you were looking at the author's machine. It's a great way to learn, and you're welcome to do this to our page if it helps you.