This page provides a site map, together with some notes on the design of the site and the tools and standards used in developing it.

Please let us know if you have any problems using the site, or any other comments you want to make.

Site map

• Home page provides an entry point for the site.
• Supporting pages:
  • Contact us provides our e-mail and phone contact details.
  • Site search provides an Atomz search on the site.
  • About this site is this page, which includes the site map, and design notes.
• Who we are gives some information about the partnership and links to individual pages for:
  • Margaret Aldis
    • Documentation tools
    • Projects and publications
  • Martyn Aldis
• What we do introduces our services and links to further pages for more detail:
  • Publication architecture and document design describes our consultancy and design services.
  • Technical writing and content development describes how we develop paper and online documents.
  • Formatting and publishing support lists the activities involved in getting documents ready for publication in a variety of formats.
• Portfolio shows some examples of our work and links to the following samples:
  • PRICES project Resources for Publicity and Promotion illustrated poem
  • PRICES project Resources for Publicity and Promotion example cartoon
  • BOS User Guide example pages
  • Emeraude TCI example pages
  • Scripting Help example topic
• Word clinic is an entry point for information and help with Microsoft Word:
  • Word template development and consultancy services covers our Word customization, consultancy and document rescue services.
  • Word information sources gives some pointers on how to make use of freely available sources of knowledge to solve Word problems or gain Word know-how.
  • Word workarounds articles links to a series of articles for technical authors published in the ISTC Journal, Communicator.
  • How to restart style-based numbering is the first part of a FAQ covering a common problem with Word numbering. The remaining parts of the FAQ are:
    • Restart numbering manually with the Restart Numbering command
    • Restart numbering using VBA
    • Restart numbering automatically using a higher level style
    • Restart numbering using LISTNUM fields

Site design notes

The purpose of this site is of course to describe and promote our services to potential clients. It is simply 'brochureware' whose primary aim is to make this information accessible online. However, we think visitors might reasonably expect a site about people who design, write and publish documents to be an example of their own work, so a secondary aim is to demonstrate some of the design and communication skills we use more generally.

For this reason, we decided to create a site in a simple text-based design, with the emphasis on solid mark-up and a clean use of style sheets. The following points highlight the standards we have followed:

• Conformance to CSS Level 2. There is a single CSS for all the pages on the site, which has been validated using the W3C CSS validator. Using a style sheet separates the rendering of the pages from their content and logical structure - a common thread in all types of document processing.
• Conformance to XHTML 1.0 standard. The pages of this site are coded in conformance with the Strict DTD of XHTML 1.0. The pages have been validated against the DTD using the W3C validator and version 5.51 of the CSE HTML Validator tool. Using a well-defined set of document elements, rather than the 'tag soup' or WYSIWYG concepts of mark-up, is an approach we consistently follow in all types of document production.
• Conformance with W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. We have checked the pages in the site against the Priority 1 and Priority 2 points of the Guidelines, and also validated using the CSE HTML Validator tool. Colours have been checked for suitability for colour-deficient visitors using the information and palettes provided by BTExact.
• Browser compatibility. Since the visitors to this site are expected to be other businesses and professional communicators, we have concentrated on conformance to current standards rather than supporting browser 'quirks'. Nevertheless, we have attempted to ensure that the pages will appear acceptably on different browsers and systems, and with different user preferences. The display has been checked on PCs with Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 5.5, Opera 7, and Mozilla 1.3, and on the Mac with Opera 5. The pages are legible, using browser default fonts and layout, without CSS, but do not display correctly using CSS in Netscape 4 and IE 4.