Site History

I started this project with no knowledge about web design at all. I had thought for some time that the Dorcan Church should have a presence on the World Wide Web. I figured that since it is our first point of reference when visiting other parts of the country other people would do the same.

The starting point was to search other web sites for ideas. In particular I looked at Earlsdon Methodist Church and Putnoe Heights Church.

Earlsdon is where my wife comes from and where we were married so we often look to see what  is  happening when our next visit is due. Putnoe Heights I found from a web search when looking for inspiration for intercession prayers. They are also an Ecumenical partnership but operate in a slightly different way.

The next step was to find an inexpensive web authoring program. I found Nvu which is free and does the job quite well. Development of this program stopped in 2005 so I changed to "Kompozer" which works in the same way.

The Earlsdon Methodist site has a technical page which saved me from making all those mistakes when you are learning. In particular I was introduced to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) This took a couple of days to master. I was quite pleased when I produced  three columns where I wanted them and in any colour I chose.

So that was the style sorted. Content is another matter so initially I trawled the weekly church notices and monthly magazine to get some initial input. I am now looking for people to feed information or perhaps take responsibility for a page or two.

Tony Prichard April 2007

23rd. May 2007 - www.dorcanchurch.org.uk acquired for an initial period of two years.

23rd. June 2007 - External CSS completed and version two published for comparison.

28th. June 2007 - Web pages verified for W3C, XHTML 1.0 and W3C css standards compliance.

1st. July 2007 - www.dorcanchurch.org.uk  set to forward URL to existing site.

24th. September 2007 - CSS version set to be the default website.

18th. November 2008 - www.dorcanchurch.co.uk added and hosting moved to FreeVirtualServers.

20th. November 2009 - Contact form added to hide e-mail addresses. Major update commenced to check all pages for content and revised style

4th. March 2010 - Coverted pages to PHP. Thus making it possible to edit the navigation menus and common content from a single file. Only the changed content needs to be uploaded saving bandwidth.

2011 - Changed to editing with Dreamweaver. Added search box to index page.

2017 - Re-arranged file structure in preparation for a new website.

February 2021 - Since there had been no progress on suggestions for a new site work commenced to update site.
Table formats updated to modern layouts with CSS. Rounded edges added to images. Responsive attributes added to pages to make the site render better on a variety of screen sizes including mobile phones. Drop menu changed to a more modern style.