About this Site

JHM Digital - John Myring’s site for Digital Dabblers

ABOUT THIS SITE.

If you read ‘About Me’ on the preceding page you will know I regard myself as a ‘dabbler’; if you didn’t read it, you were very sensible.

Anyway my first attempt at a web site was to use one of those Internet companies which provide a variety of templates on their own site for you to choose from and then upload your pictures and text to. It worked very well [and I’ve seen some excellent work displayed on such sites] but after a while I became bored with it. My inclination to dabble was severely restricted.

I wanted something which would allow me to experiment, generally muck around and completely change my site if I wished.

So I looked around for some software which not only allowed me to build a site without knowledge of html [of which I know nothing] but also to easily upload it. The Adobe products, whilst undoubtedly excellent and with the benefit of dovetailing with my Photoshop, were far too expensive and far more sophisticated than I needed. Eventually I tried Serif WebPlus [I was already using their excellent desk top publishing software PagePlus] and found it exactly what I wanted.

This site was built using WebPlus X2 which contains everything you need to build and easily upload a sophisticated site . It contains a good variety of templates or you can easily constructed your own site once you’ve played around with the software. Quite honestly I think it is fantastic value. I did upgrade to their latest version, X5, but found there was a problem in it which prevented uploading to my site; otherwise it is a good upgrade. Serif Technical Help initially tried to solve the problem, then decided it was with my ISP; they in turn found they couldn’t help either. So, in the meantime I have reverted to my old X2 version. I know though that this problem does not affect all users; visit their site, www.serif.com .

For animated text I use Presto 2. See my ‘Software’ page on this site for the web address for this programmes.

My sites are hosted by my ISP, Eclipse www.eclipse.net.uk/residential who were already providing my e-mail service and whom I found to be reasonably priced and always extremely helpful and patient when I got into difficulties.

My first site was www.barnetts.eclipse.co.uk which used the web space provided with my Eclipse package.Then, having delusions of grandeur and with some vague idea of selling my pictures at some future date, I purchased the name ‘jhmdigital.co.uk’ through Eclipse for a few pounds and now run it as my main site.

So that is were I am now. I’m toying with the idea of offering my pictures for sale but I need to look into it in detail; ideally I would prefer to provide a file which the buyer could print themselves. This would mean I could keep the price to a few pounds and there would be no problems with prints being damaged in the post.

There would be problems though in limiting the number of times the file could be printed and currently I can’t see a way around this so it might be that I should have to offer un-mounted prints for sale.

Should I go ahead the capability to set up e-commerce already exists in WebPlus X2 and later versions.