"Artists that paint in code"

So Ben Saunders quoted and mentioned his "weird hobby" - mine too.

My brother, an IT geek, says that the design etc is nice, but what is truly impressive is there isn't a team of 4 fulltime staff behind it, only Jamie working part time - thanks, Andy!

Philosophy

Minimalist, fast loading to navigate instantly. Photos are higher quality since many people are on broadband. Site is bearable in 800x600, perfect in 1024x768 and great in 1280x? with history bar etc.

Top picture design

Entirely mine, try changing the width of your browser window, rest of the design is mine also.

No XHTML and still using tables

Mike Meyers mentioned that HTML4 and laying out with tables were enough for his needs - mine too. It is impossible to make my layout cleanly and working in all (any!) browsers with DIV tags alone (two wasted days). I set the DOC type from A List Apart.

CSS

Mezzoblue's css crib sheet and Apple started me on clean coding, Macromedia's standard templates in DreamWeaver showed me how to keep the style sheet to a minimum and I wrote them in BradSoft's TopStyle Lite. There is still a little "inheritance" work and font sizing to do here.

Color schemes

Visibone (now defunct) orders the old websafe colors is an instructive way but the breakthrough of combining the RGB palette in pleasing ways was the amazing Color Schemer Online V2. I still have some implementation to do here!

Tidying

Macromedia's HomeSite is my seriously powerful FAST site wide "search and replace" tool, better than any other solution.

Everyday work

I hate to admit it to serious webheads but I use FrontPage, good for spelling, format painting, and easy uploading, bad for missing end tags. Microsoft's Expression Web makes cleaner code but can't paint formats with a single click.

Photos

Canon's Zoombrowser makes looking thru 20,000 photos easy then I work with them in Adobe ImageReady and Adobe Lightroom.

New photo galleries

Not up yet. Ben Saunder's header inspired me and my starting point is Airtight Interactive's Simple Viewer.

Inspiration

After a 10 hour day on the laptop the music at New Orleans bar in Kathmandu inspired my most creative thinking and problem solving (yep, I live in Kathmandu).

Stats

More than 300 pages, well over 1000 photos and around 160MB. Over 2000 unique visitors a day and more than 500 a week visit more than once. Not bad for a wonderful but obscure, small trekking outfit.

Jamie McGuinness