Because everyone and everything needs a website! Please comment on the guestbook or by emailing me at colin@beveridge.com.
This latest version of the website is data-driven, using ASP coding and MS Access databases. There's also a fair bit of JavaScript in play. Websites I've designed recently for friends using similar technology include atlanticpartnership.com and thewinterball.com.
The image at the top of every page is a sunset view at 28,000ft above the Lake District, UK, from seat 5A of a British Regional Airlines Airbus A319, operating a British Airways service from Birmingham to Edinburgh in November 2001.
I do quite a bit of freelance website work for political causes. The first major project I took on was the Scottish Conservative Party, scottishtories.org.uk. I've redesigned it several times now, but the back-end has remained constant and it allows Tory staffers to manage the news and press release content themselves without any further work on my part.
Sometimes, special campaign sites are in order. For the March 2000 Ayr by-election, we kicked ass with vote-tory-for-ayr.org, attracting the attention of the media [BBC News, "Ayr-time on the internet"] as well as thousands of voters. To my delight the site also attracted the envy of the opposition, prompting one major party to actually put out a desperate press release, titled, "TORIES WIN WEB WAR... I DON’T THINK SO". They can believe that if they want to but at the end of the day, the Tories won the by-election!
One other notable site that I enjoyed creating was the cunning short-life campaign guiltyMPs.com (March 2000), highlighting the poor voting records of opposition MPs, and advertised nationwide.
Anyway, back to the CARB website. History is usually interesting, so here is a pictorial history of the
three previous incarnations of this website. The earliest, at the bottom of the page, was in fact
one of the first few dozen personal webpages on the Internet.
Above: 1999-2001. The most recent past CARB website came about whilst studying web server stuff at Napier University. Once I knew how to set up a web server I felt like making myself a new website. The design was partly inspired by the Hong Kong Tourist Board. It was located initially at www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/~is8009, my student webspace, but later I relocated it to a nicer URL, www.colin.beveridge.com, a paid-for webspace from Mailbank, who also provide my colin@beveridge.com email address. This site was basically just a portal page, with no content, so I kept the older, ultra-comprehensive, CARB website online aswell (see below).
Above: the 1997-2001 CARB website looked like this, the layout having been inspired by the index page of an old British Airways website, and it had one page per letter of the alphabet. It's URL was www.carb.fsnet.co.uk, a free webspace account provided by Freeserve. One neat feature was the floating information box which would appear when the mouse hovered over a link. Another experimental bit of Javascript I wrote was a pull-down list of CARB mugshots, which would pop-up in a small window when selected.
Above: 1994-96. The very first CARB webpage was a single page with no graphics, way back in the early days of the Internet (this was even before US Vice-President Al Gore had "invented" it). It looked like this by 1995, by which time two fonts could be used and bullet lists became possible. Latterly the URL was www.ee.ed.ac.uk/~ee2carb, my student webspace in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Edinburgh University.
