Help Desk

How to use this website

Printing

This site is also designed to be printer friendly. Any text within this site is guaranteed to print without cutting on the right hand side. What's more, the pages have been coded so persons printing any pages will not be wasting any ink printing the top menu and footer menu.

To print, press CTRL and P (or Command+P on Mac PCs) to save time moving your mouse to the File section on the top right of your browser. If you wish to save on printer ink, or rid your documents of the file references at the top and bottom, click on File, then move to Page Setup. Some browsers also allow the option of printing or not printing background images.

Bookmarking pages

On Firefox and Chrome web browsers, press CTRL and D (cmd+D on Macs), rather than moving your mouse towards the Bookmarks menu. For users of Microsoft Internet Explorer, go to Favorites and select Add to Favorites.

Content and Links

To the top right hand side column is the main navigation menu. Some secondary navigation may be seen before the main content on multiple paged articles. At the bottom of some pages may be links to further references related to each article.

Some pages within this site include inner secondary pages. For example, the Drawings section has an inner section leading to some examples of artwork. Within the right column, some pages have additional links to the inner pages. For example, the poetry page will have links to pieces between K - S at the bottom of the final piece.

The main links at the top are designed to create a sense of hierarchy between the core pages and secondary pages. All links use ever dependable HTML hyperlinks rather than image maps or Adobe Flash movies.

Each page within this site is listed within the Sitemap page. Unlike the previous version of this site, pages are created using <DIV> tags, with CSS used to position the text layout as well as the text itself.

Lightbox Effects

Some image files within the website use a form of graphics known as a 'lightbox effect'. This means the main browser window turns black when an image is clicked. The image emerges outside the main browser window using jQuery and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to create this effect.

The lightbox effects within this website also support keyboard navigation. Pressing the left arrow key will move you to the previous image, whereas pressing the right arrow will move you to the next image. To close the image, press the 'Esc' key.

If the browser does not support JavaScript (or that the JavaScript is turned off within your browser), the image will load as normal without the lightbox effects.

Graphics: Icons and Illustrations

Most of the icons on this website use the excellent Font Awesome range of icons, which are a good forerunner to the previous PECS style pictograms. A lot of contemporary websites use the Font Awesome icons to illustrate certain items or as bullet points.

Though connection speeds have increased since The Stuart Vallantine Web Experience surfaced in 2006, file sizes are still kept as low as possible to enable fast loading times. There is nothing more annoying than waiting ages for your desired page to load, due to an illustration boasting a file size the same as an Amiga 600's RAM capacity. Though important in the age of dial-up internet, this theory still rings true for smartphone or tablet users.

For persons browsing this website on mobile phones (including Apple's iPhone and Google's Android phones), PDAs and Blackberry devices, all graphics and overall layout have been optimised to load effectively. The site has also been tested for use on various mobile phones thanks mainly to Google Chrome's Inspect Element section, and its mobile device screen views.