SCALA's website was created in the middle of 1995 by David Cobb. Dave had some computer background but no previous experience in writing hypertext markup language (html) code and no html editor to assist him. He learnt coding from scratch and used a simple text editor to create the original SCALA Homepage and the Made and Played Catalogue (no longer maintained on our website but transmogrified into the SCALA Catalogue). Dave also designed most of the nifty graphics used (and then animated by me) on the homepage on the original website. Quite a herculean task! The colours of the large SCALA logo were Dave's work (I added a 3D effect at some stage).
With the move to our own domain in late 2003 I undertook an ongoing revision of the original website. Thanks to some clues provided by computer guru Peter Zajax I was able to use some simple javascript to provide a header and footer on each page (so if changes are needed I only need to change one file rather than edit each page). This is an enormous improvement over the original website but it does mean that visitors need to have a browser with javascript enabled. Every page on our new domain has a toolbar enabling the visitor to quickly access the Homepage as well as the main page for each major section. Back in 1997, one of our members, Jonn Gorden, provided a first draft Frames layout for the SCALA website. We used the frames version for a short time but we've retained Jonn's icons (created for the frames version) and added a couple more for the current SCALA domain toolbar. Thanks Jonn. Please Note: Alt text will display on this site as titles over graphics on MS Internet Explorer only but not on Opera and Firefox (although there is a script available for the latter browser through the GreaseMonkey extension which will cover my programming oversight). Apologies to users of alternative browsers to MSIE. I will endeavour to eventually overcome this problem on the SCALA site.
- Robert Childs (SCALA President and webmaster)
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Late in 1995 Dave passed his fine work on to me and, for good or ill, I've been tinkering with it ever since, adding pages, designing simple graphics, adding links and so on. I've tried to follow the principles that Dave laid down, which he picked up from other website designers, mainly following the KISS (keep it simple, stupid) principle with relatively small pages and graphics to allow for faster downloading. When pages start to get to about 32k I generally split them. I try to keep gifs and jpegs under 15k whilst trying to retain reasonable onscreen definition. Above all we decided early on to ensure that the SCALA website was easily navigable. Various stages of the old SCALA website can be viewed at the