About the Site
Content and Site
The content was initially written by P. Iatroudakis between 1992 and 2005, save few properly attributed exceptions (in the Greek texts). The editing of the content, the design and development of the site were all made between May and August 2005, by the same.
Preferred Settings
The site is best viewed on a 15" monitor, at a resolution of 1024x768, with Mozilla Firefox.
Nevertheless, the site has been designed so that only minor differences will be experienced when using another monitor size or Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. There will be, however, inevitable differences when viewed in lower resolutions.
According to the June 2005 data from TheCounter.com, the combined Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and Mozilla Firefox traffic was accounting for about 90% of all Internet traffic.
Accessibility
The Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops guidelines to help make the web accessible to people with disabilities. There are three levels of conformance (A, AA, AAA) and the consultancy's site conforms to the first one (A). The automatically verifiable checkpoints have been checked with Hermish, one of the evaluation tools mentioned in the tools list of W3C.
Technical Information
The site was put together with free and open source software. The pages were written directly in XHTML using TSW WebPad International and PSPad. The code was regularly checked with HTML Tidy. No scripting has been used.
Content
The site follows W3C standards. The content has been kept separate from the layout. The html files are verified by the W3C HTML Validator as valid XHTML 1.0 Strict.
The validity of the links has been checked with the W3C Link Checker.
The average access time to the site pages is estimated to about 3.3 seconds on a 56K modem. Contributing towards this is the small size of the pages, the use of CSS (cf. below, Layout) and the limited use of graphics.
The graphics were created or optimized with Gimp, Inkscape and pngout. The png format has been used throughout.
Layout
The css files used for the layout are verified in the W3C CSS Validator as valid. Both frames and tables have been avoided in the layout, in favour of two CSS techniques, fixed positioning and liquid layout.
Metatada
The site's metadata are written in RDF/XML following the DCMI Metadata Terms vocabulary of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. The metadata, in xml files, are verified in the W3C RDF Validator as valid. The metadata layout is better viewed with Mozilla Firefox.
Hosting and Search
The site is hosted by Stadon Lab, while Atomz provides the search engine.
RSS Feed
Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0) is an XML-based file format for content distribution. Atom is an improved version of RSS. They are both used as a quick way to find out the latest additions to a website and for this reason they are heavily used by news organizations.
Some browsers (like Firefox, Opera and Safari) are able to recognize RSS. More widespread, perhaps, is the use of aggregator programmes, like RSSOwl, as they have the ability to collect and display RSS feeds from many sources.
The consultancy's RSS feed follows the latest content updates. To use it right-click and copy the link from the XML icon on the home page and paste it in the aggregator programme. There the headlines will appear, with summaries and links to the relative website pages.
Last modified: 2008-12-05
