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Site History
Summer 2003: The basic style of the site is arrived at, after numerous modifications and changes of heart. Not being a web designer with sufficient artistic talent, I opted for a straightforward and unsophisticated look. I decided on baxian.org.uk as the domain name, after the English composer Sir Arnold Bax who died fifty years ago in 1953.
14th September 2003: I photographed Idsworth church in Hampshire, which formed the banner image for the site. The photograph was taken on a hot, late summers afternoon, and the image was heavily edited in Paint Shop Pro before I arrived at the final version. Idsworth was favoured over Chilcomb church near Winchester, which I also photographed on the same afternoon. Although I hadn't visited Idsworth church before, it represented both Hampshire, churches, and the South Downs. I became attracted to the South Downs in West Sussex during 2002, and it provides a tenuous musical link because the English composer John Ireland was inspired by the Downs, as seen in such works as A Downland Suite, Legend and the Cello Sonata, and Sir Arnold Bax lived in Storrington, West Sussex during the latter part of his life.
September to November 2003: During this period I studied nine Hampshire churches which provided the start for the churches pages, and set the style for the individual church reports and their accompanying galleries. These churches, in order of when I initially visited them, were Mapledurwell, Steventon, Hunton, Wonston, Freefolk, Tufton, Longparish, Goodworth Clatford and Little Somborne. I started off visiting these churches on bike, but unfortunately it got stolen after my visit to Freefolk so I visited Tufton, Longparish, Goodworth Clatford and Little Somborne by car.
February 2004: A start is made on pages for the music section, and particularly for the Romantic Piano Concerto pages.
11th February 2004: The domain name baxian.org.uk is registered and the first pages become available. However, most are incomplete, and only four churches (Mapledurwell, Hunton, Wonston and Goodworth Clatford) have galleries.
17th March 2004: Longparish church galleries are added.
19th March 2004: Steventon church galleries are added.
11th April 2004: Little Somborne and Freefolk galleries are added.
2nd June 2004: A cascading style sheet is introduced to control the main font, links and page colour for the site's pages. The main font is changed from Arial to Georgia, and the links are no longer underlined.
Software and hardware used on this site
The site is designed primarily using Microsoft FrontPage 2002, with the addition of Xara Webstyle 3.1. Originally I used Webstyle for the side navbars as well the top navbar, but I wasn't satisfied with this arrangement so have used it for the top navbar only. Thanks to my brother for supplying the script used for the last modified dates at the bottom of each page, and to www.maxxblade.co.uk/clock for generating the code used for the clock..
I generally use an Olympus mju300 3.2 megapixel digital camera for my photographs, and they have been edited using Jasc Paintshop Pro 8 and Microsoft Picture It! Photo 7. Unfortunately I over-edited quite a number of the earlier photos so that many look rather aggressive and not as natural as they did. I intend to replace the worst at some stage.
Most scanned images have been achieved using a Canon Lide 30 flatbed scanner. |
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© Copyright 2004, Barry Meehan |
