Technical Details

Being a former eCommerce consultant in Accenture's Technology competency, I can't stop thinking about the technical architecture of a website. Therefore I would like to tell you a bit about the details.

My nephew built this website using php and MySQL. Every page is published from a MySQL database and there is an automatic publishing-tool, so that Saskia and me can update our pages without having to use FTP. The tool is custom built by my nephew.

For every travel report we write, the formating is done automatically, and it is placed in the menu. The whole navigation is made active using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Having done some work on usability, we tried to keep the website easy to navigate and foremost fast. Therefore downloading times are minimized by optimizing all graphics. The template is 1 gif-image of 24 kb, and both images on the homepage add up to 32 kb. That should do it even on a 28k8 line. I have to be honest though about regular publishing of pictures on the website. They are all scanned in Internet cafes on the way, and that means that quality control can be tough sometimes! I try to keep the size, resolution and quality of every picture in balance, but sometimes the scanner sucks, or there is no software to edit the pictures. So, I'm sorry if some of the pictures are 100kb or higher...

If you check our statistics, you can see the technology used by the people/computer visiting our website: colour-depth, screen resolution, operating system, browser version, etc..

The message board is powered by YaBB, which is made by my nephew Zef. It is an share ware, open-source message board, and very sophisticated. Excellent work!