Web site creation from scratch!

[#1]

I'm going to have to wait until I'm thinking a bit clearer but once I am shall do my homework & see if its something I might manage to cope with.
I must say  I was not only impressed with the design of your site which is more professional than I can hope to aspire to but also interested in your former career, however  brief, as a marine engineer. My father was the Lt(E) on HMS VENOMOUS which explained why I set up my own imprint to publish this book. He went to sea in 1921 as a junior engineer in the Merchant Navy and retired forty years later in 1961 and my next book will be called "Forty Years at Sea: a voyage with my father."
But this is not at all relevant to web editing but may contact you via your site.
Bill

[#2]

Gary
The site is mainly static HTML bar one page which is a Wordpress blog. I have edited the Wordpress theme so that it matches the rest of the site. All done with CSS including the menus which also work in Wordpress. The CSS menus I have adapted rather than written from scratch and are from http://www.cssplay.co.uk/
Bill
Yes, a very short time and I spent thirty plus years doing something unconnected with either Navy or engineering. Look forward to hearing from you when you have recovered.
All the best
John

[#3]

@Bill, Get well soon.
@Journeyman, Tocking of your menus thay do not work with Internet Explorer v6, plus with Firefox thay do not allow you to Cut And Paste in to the clipboard, well not easily, I find that 99.9% of veas dropdown menus a paine, with me using a Text Reader.
[Edit]
Personally I do not like CSS, I do all my sites in plain html

[#4]

Gary
What  you mean of course is that IE6 doesn't work with my menus I can't say that I'm surprised, I tried it out in most of the common browsers but I run Windows 7 64bit and Firefox, I have IE 9 installed along with Opera and a few others but IE6 won'r run. IE6 is after all 10 years old and even Microsoft are trying desperately to persuade users to upgrade.
Not sure what you mean about about cut & paste I tried this and provided you just copy from below the menus there is no problem If of course you highlight the whole page and copy & paste this you get the full text of the menu.
Not sure if there is anything to be done for the screen reader as if you add an "audio" CSS file to ignore the menus then they don't get heard at all.
According to the pundits from the W3C, CSS is the way ahead and CSS3 is well under way along with HTML 5.
All the best
John

[#5]

Quote from: Journeyman

What  you mean of course is that IE6 doesn't work with my menus

Yes that is what I mean
I use:

• Windows XP Home.


• Internet Explorer v6 in Sandboxie.


• Netscape Navigator v4.7 to check my sites with.


• Netscape Composer v4.7 to build my sites with.


• Firefox v3.6.13 in Sandboxie for sites like yours.  

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IE6 is after all 10 years old and even Microsoft are trying desperately to persuade users to upgrade.

True.

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Not sure what you mean about cut & paste I tried this and provided you just copy from below the menus there is no problem

That is the problem I need to copy the text from the menu in to my clipboard for my Text Reader to Read the menu to me, the same as I do on the main of the page.
[Edit]
HTML 5 is a Security nightmare.

[#6]

Hi Gary
I see what you mean about the cut and paste although I ttried this by doing (in Firefox) Edit - Select All, Edit - Copy and pasted the clipboard into Notepad, this gave me a nice neat list at the begining of the page with each menu item. I don't know if this is any good for the screen reader though as each item has a bullet in front of it. You can also achieve a similar result by turning off the styling (CSS) from the Firefox menu View - Page Style - No Style the menu then comes up as a list, again with bullets.
You have however made me think about adding some extra navigation to some of the pages (the front page has a link to a sitemap from where you can reach everything) so that those using troublesome browsers can get to all of the site. It must of course be said that my target audience is fairly small so I don't get a lot of feedback.
Cheers
John

[#7]

Thank you John for your reply, I will try turning off the styling (CSS) in Firefox.
It is good practise to have a sitemap with all your internal links on it!