About the Site Technical Background

Development Tools

The main development tool used was Macromedia Ultradev 4.

All images were optimised using PaintShop Pro 5.

Website

The website has been developed for an IIS 5 platform. The front-end has been developed in HTML, while Cascading Style Sheets are used for the formatting of content. The majority of pages on the website are database-driven, with ASP being used to web-enable the database. A DSN-less connection is made to the database.

The site has been tested on a variety of browsers and browser versions and has also been tested on Jaws®.

HTML and CSS have been validated against W3C standards and where possible we have to tried to adhere to Bobby AAA standards.

Database

The database is currently 5Mb with an estimated growth rate of 200K per week. There are currently 1676 records, but it is estimated this will grow at a rate of 50 records per week at an average size of 40K.

Currently, the back-end database is a Microsoft Access 2000 database but can be easily upsized to MS SQL Server or MySQL when required.

The database is in 3rd normal form using standard database normalisation techniques.

Server

The website is hosted by a commercial web host who provide the latest Microsoft Windows 2000 Servers using twin processor servers as standard and 6 DS3 connections (45Mb each) to different Tier 1 backbone providers. Their SLA guarantees a sub 3ms latency between a server and the Internet backbone. Their average uptime over the last 2 years is above 99.9%.

The estimated number of hits per day is 17500 using the formula:

Hits per Day = visits per day (350) * average number of pages (10) * average number of downloads per page(5)