Build Info: White Beer Travels website

White Beer Travels. What's in a name? All is revealed on the Home page

Schneider Weisse, a well-travelled, classic Wheat/White Beer, brewed in Bavaria by Schneider. Click on the image to go to their website

This page gives information on how the White Beer Travels website was built. John White was new to website building when he built this site. Info on how he did it, for what it is worth, is provided below, but more importantly, help received is most gratefully acknowledged

Belgian Beer, German Beer, British Real Ale, North American Craft Beer and Speciality Beer and Specialty Beer from around the world, are all covered in this White Beer Travels website

This White Beer Travels website has been in operation since March, 2002. It promotes Speciality/Craft Beer from around the world: Belgian Beer, German Beer, Craft Beer from the USA and Canada, Real Ale from the UK, etc

Belgian Beer and other great Speciality/Craft Beers, these including Real Ale from the UK and Craft Beers from the USA and Canada, are promoted on this, the White Beer Travels website. It is a big site, so to get an outline idea of the contents, click here to go to the site's Contents page

Würzburg, in Germany, is world-renowned for its "Franken" wines. However, White (Wheat) Beers have certainly travelled to the city. The three different ones shown here are excellent examples. All are brewed in the city's Würzburger Hofbräu Brewery. Click on the glasses to go to the brewery's website, from which the image was pasted

Please Click Here to Bookmark the White Beer Travels Home page, i.e. add it to your Favorites

Please Click Here to Bookmark this White Beer Travels "Build the Website" page

This is a photo taken at the Achouffe Brewery, Belgium. Click on this scanned photo to go to the brewery's website

Since setting up the Achouffe Brewery , in the Ardennes, in Wallonia, the French-speaking half of Belgium, in 1982, Chris Bauweraerts and his brother-in-law, Pierre Gobron, have built the brewery up into one of the most revered in the beer world.

In this September, 1997 photo by "Second Petal", Sylvia Clow, Chris is with John White in the brewery's bar. John has one of the world's truly great beers in his hand: the brewery's flagship La Chouffe. It is available here on draught and in discerning bars elsewhere. On this visit there was someone present from the Cheval Blanc brewery in Canada, which has since been absorbed into the Brasseurs R.J. (www.brasseursrj.com), who are based in Montreal. These brew an Achouffe beer under licence. For more information, click here for the White Beer Travels Web page covering Montréal.

Info on Building the "White Beer Travels" website & The Help Received

White Beer Travels' John White built this website himself, mainly because it was something that he wanted to do!

He hopes that you find the site functional and that it provides sufficient information on the Beer Hunts and other services that he offers.

Comments on the site will be very greatly received by e-mail, phone, fax or by letter; to send me an e-mail, click here. For other contact details, click on Contact Details, here or at the top or bottom of this page.

Chouffe is Wallonian dialect for a gnome or dwarf, as well as being conveniently close in spelling to Achouffe. Gnomes are a particular feature of local folklore, and the valley in which Achouffe is located is known as the Vallée des Fées: Valley of the Fairies.

Although having a reasonable computer and Internet background, he was new to website building when he commenced work on this, his first website. He is very grateful to the help that he has received from Amaryllis Design Agency Limited (www.amaryllis.co.uk). Contact details can be found on the Amaryllis website.

Amaryllis provides a complete website building service for those who do not wish to do this themselves. They certainly have the credentials; not many can boast having their own website back in 1993, a time truly in the dark ages as far as the Internet is concerned! Have a look at sites they have built (there are links from their site) to see for yourself what a professional job they do. This is backed up by superb technical support. They promptly answered a multitude of queries, on file naming conventions, file layout, etc, etc, prior to any money passing hands.

For example, somewhat amazingly, if John sent off an e-mail technical query at 10pm, as likely as not it would be fully answered within the hour! Also prior to any commitment, they provided services such as a free tutorial on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), these being used, for example, to implement the hover properties of the site's hyperlinks. But most importantly, the service is just as good after signing up with Amaryllis. In summary, they provide a magnificent service, at all stages of dealing with them!

In August, 2002, John commissioned Amaryllis Design Agency Limited, to do a makeover of the principal pages of the site based on the original pages that John had created. The main object was to improve the appearance of the pages and make them display uniformly over all PC screen resolutions. These new pages, of which this "Build Information" page is an example, and ones that John updated or created subsequently himself were progressively commissioned from September, 2002, such that all, bar one, of the site's pages are now in the new format, i.e. for a direct comparison of the old style and new styles pages, click here to have a look at the legacy version of this "Build Information" page. I am sure that you will agree that they greatly improved the appearance of the site.

This is a reproduction of a box housing Macromedia Dreamweaver software. Macromedia's Dreamweaver package is regarded as the best package in its class by most professional website designers and builders. Click here to go to the Macromedia website

Summary recommendations from Amaryllis Design, all of which were taken up include:

build the site using the Dreamweaver package from Macromedia (www.macromedia.com);
register the Domain names (www.whitebeertravels.com and www.whitebeertravels.co.uk) using Easily.co.uk , transferring the ".co.uk" one to Amaryllis once the site was built; leave the ".com" with Easily.co.uk for hosting of the e-mail address, , see below, and provision of e-mail forwarding for other e-mail addresses, such as those followed by whitebeertravels.com (info@, webmaster@, joyce@, etc, see below);
the use of WS_FTP for uploading and downloading of the website to and from its server (there is a free-of-charge version of this package, but John uses a version (WS_FTP Pro) that can be purchased and downloaded from www.ipswitch.com , the free version being for non-commercial sites).

The Dreamweaver package (Version 4) arrived from www.jungle.com (now a subsidiary of Argos) with their customary quick delivery on the 10th of January, 2002. The package came with a forbiddingly large manual, but John did the excellent tutorial at the front, which equipped him with over ninety percent of the skills required.

Note that what one does in Dreamweaver and equivalent packages is converted into computer programmes, that are executed to actually run the pages. Typically the language used is called HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). To have a look at the HTML source code for any Web page, for example, using Microsoft's Internet Explorer or the Opera browser, click on "View" and then select "Source" from the pulled-down menu. For many who build Web pages, fiddling with this source code is not necessary. However, if you require certain features, then one has to do it. For example, since the pages of the White Beer Travels website are frequently updated, I want people to see the latest pages and not old versions that have been cached on their PC's hard drive. Therefore, as you will see, if you do a "View Source", I have the following "Meta Tag" near the top of the HTML code:

The following Meta Tag allows one to put accents on Czech words such as U Fleků, a famous Brew Pub, in Prague, and on České Budějovice, home of the renowned Budweiser Budvar (Budějovický Budvar) Brewery (Character Set 1250 is for Central and Eastern European Characters):

Further information on Meta Tags can be obtained from specialist books or from Web pages, such as www.codeproject.com/html/meta.asp.

The following code, that appears in the head section of the site's Home page, puts a 16x16 pixel "Favicon" next to the title of any pages from the White Beer Travels site that anyone should add to the "Favorites" list in their Internet Explorer browser. The Favicon or "Favorites Icon" (favicon.ico), which has "W B T" (White Beer Travels) on it, was created using the Microangelo Value Pack, which is available on twenty-day free trial from www.microangelo.us:

Another reason that you may need to get into the HTML is to provide functionality that a package such as Dreamweaver does not support. For example, with the package itself, there is no direct way of inserting "superscripted" characters, such as the degree symbol in the famous Trappist Beer, from Belgium, Rochefort 10^o, or "subscripted" ones, such as the "2" in the chemical symbol for one of the major products of the fermentation stage of brewing, Carbon Dioxide, CO₂. I found out how to do this by finding Web pages that used these features and just copy/pasted the "Tags" that create them into my own HTML source code, i.e. <sup>o</sup> and <sub>2</sub> respectively. Note that Dreamweaver 4 has been superseded by more enhanced versions that are much easier to use and provide additional, more powerful functionality, although supercripts and subscripts are not included in Dreamweaver MX 2004, which John upgraded to, in December, 2003. This was purchased from www.misco.co.uk, who, on this occasion, had the edge on price; they also delivered it very quickly.

Other forms of tags can be used to add music to page(s) of the site. For example, the following code produces the small media player below it; the larger button is the Play/Pause button; the smaller is the Stop button. It plays a MIDI (.mid format) version of Sonny Boy Wiliamson II's "Help Me" (which is based on "Green Onions", by Booker T and the MG's), which, as can be seen, is held in a folder called "music".

This above music does not start automatically (autostart="false"), as this can annoy visitors to the site, especially if they are browsing in their office! However, the one playing Fats Domino's "Blueberry Hill", at www.whitebeertravels.com/images, starts automatically since one should not really be at this part of the site, which is a folder full of the sites images! This one plays without a media player (width="0") and automatically (autostart="true").

Of course, you might also, inadvertently try to reach a page of the White Beer Travels website that does not exist. Normally, this would result in a rather unhelpful "Error 404: File not Found" message. To get around this, I have customised my own "Error 404" page which provides useful information to hopefully get you back on track. Try it by trying to go to a non-existent page such as www.whitebeertravels.com/test.

On the Downloads page of the site, one can purchase White Beer Travels guides/eBooks using the renowned, free-of-charge, PayPal® system. This is easy to use, is secure, and costs the purchaser nothing to use. The buttons, such as the typical "Add to Basket" ones used, as per the example to the right, are easily generated as HTML on the PayPal® website. This is then pasted into the source code in the appropriate place(s). PayPal® can also be used for payments for Future White Beer Travels Beer Hunts and for White Beer Travels French to English Translation Services (French text and English text). The English-language pages of the website for the Bruxellensis Beer Festival, www.festivalbruxellensis.be, that takes place in Brussels, are an example of the French to English translation work that John has undertaken.

With the above example PayPal® button one can purchase the seventy-eight page White Beer Travels Speciality Beer Guide to Paris.

A similar technique is used to add the amazon.co.uk animated button, and the amazon.com button that can be seen to the right. These are examples of associated websites. If one installs such buttons on your site, if people click on to them and then make a purchase, you get paid. White Beer Travels only uses this feature for sites that it is happy with. There are a number of book recommendations on various pages of the site, in which purchase from amazon.co.uk and/or amazon.com is recommended, simply because they are known to stock the books and/or the price was good. Note that the buttons can be used to purchase other items on the amazon sites, including other books, CDs, DVDs, etc, etc. Note that both sites can be used by UK residents, the US-based amazon.com having items that are not available on the other site, and vice versa. Note that one does not need to use such buttons to be part of a company's affiliate scheme, for example, the www.amazon.com, that appears on this and other pages of the White Beer Travels site, actually takes one to www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/whitebeertrav-20, the extra on the end of the address being provided by the affiliate site (in this case amazon.com) to ensure that I receive my commission if someone clicks on the seemingly simple www.amazon.co.uk, or whatever.

Below are two further example of associated websites that White Beer Travels is pleased to recommend. The first one for Expedia.com, the highly regarded site for booking flights, hotels, car hire, whole holidays, etc. The second is for "Driveline Great Getaways", who offer excellent value breaks to Paris, Lille, Bruges and Brussels. They provide accommodation, in conjunction with travel on the Eurostar train from London. The affiliate programme for "Driveline Great Getaways" is one of a big selection administered by www.buy.at, from where one can join up with the ones of your choice.

You have your cursor on a box that provides the temperature and a brief description of the weather, at Humberside Airport (HUY), at the local time quoted. Click here for a detailed weather forecast for the airport

Pasted HTML code can also be used to provide features such as the one on the left, which is the current temperature and outline weather conditions, at the local time quoted, at Humberside Airport (HUY), which is near Grimsby, where John lives. Such code, for other selected places, can be obtained free-of-charge from www.wunderground.com. For towns not covered by this site, equivalent functionality (forecast only) can be obtained from www.weatheronline.co.uk. Despite its UK origin, this site covers the whole world.

Websites or Web pages with like content can be grouped together in a Web Ring. Access to the websites making up the ring is provided by pasting HTML code supplied by the Ring Administrator (RingMaster) into the appropriate pages of your site. Examples on the White Beer Travels website are: the "Beer Ring" at the bottom of the Home page: the "George Orwell Web Ring" at the bottom of the page featuring George Orwell's favourite pub, The Moon Under Water; the "Denver Web Ring" at the bottom of the page featuring this Colorado city's famous Wynkoop Brew Pub; the "Edinburgh Web Ring" at the bottom of the page featuring the city's Caledonian Brewery and its outlets in the city; and the "GPS enthusiasts' Web Ring" at the bottom of the page covering Stress-Free Beer Hunt Navigation. These were implemented, and are maintained by the user, from the WebRing website, www.webring.com.

Fancy effects, such as this page's elastic cursor, which I have customised with a set of Belgian Beer bottles and their corresponding glasses (Orval, Rochefort 10^o, and Duvel), are achieved by inserting "JavaScript" into the HTML. This particular "elastic bullets" effect was coded by Philip Winston; it was copy/pasted from javascript.internet.com. I noted it being used on Filip Geert's Web excellent site covering Belgian Specialty Beer, surf.to/beer; on enquiring, Filip revealed the source of it to me. Further details of Filip's site can be found on the Reciprocal Links page. Other pieces of JavaScript are used to put the current date and time, " , at ", into this sentence and at the top of the site's Home Page and News Page.There are numerous books that one can buy to learn JavaScript, and help is also available, of course, on the Internet, for example from sites such as www.elated.com: click on Tutorials. The "ELATED :) Love Your Site" website is a truly excellent resource for website builders.

Note that some people do not like features such as the elastic cursor, in which case they can be disabled. In Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE), on the IE Tool Bar, click on Tools/Internet Options/Security and set Custom Level and/or Default Level to High using the slider; if set to Medium Security, Scripts such as those which run the bottles are allowed to run, but not at the High Security setting.

As well as music, one can add video to your website. for example, the following code is similar in structure to that for the above music file, except that a video file named "hello.avi" in the folder named "video" is being called (loop="false" means you get it just once, but you can use the play button to repeat it, should you so wish). It is included as part of a JavaScript routine that plays, in a new window, the video of myself giving a short "Hello". The beer I am toasting you with is the great Westvleteren 12^o(White Beer Travels Web page). Featured also are glasses for the beer and a crate of it. The video was taken by Joyce White, at home in Grimsby, England, in January, 2004. it is only a short video, as video files are very large. Note that the frame size of 160x120 pixels was not the lowest that could be produced by the digital camera used to take the video (320x240); it was reduced to 160x120, which resulted in around a four-fold reduction in file size, to speed download, using a free-of-charge package, Stoik Video Editor, from www.stoik.com. Even so, the three second video has a file size of 408kb, so give it a little time to download.

A JavaScript is also used to encrypt e-mail addresses, including my own, quoted on the Contacts page of the site and everywhere else. This prevents spammers automatically picking up these e-mail addresses with Spam Robots (SpamBots). This script, which is by Jim Tucek, can be obtained free-of-charge from www.jracademy.com/~jtucek/email. Although it is not essential, such encryption is typically used in conjunction with an image of the e-mail address being used on the page, rather than text. For example, if you float the cursor over the e-mail address at the end of this sentence, you are notified that it is an image (a GIF with a transparent background, see below), by its "alt text", the text you see, if configured, when the cursor is floated over images: . The text on the image itself, the e-mail address, cannot be picked up by SpamBots. An alternative to using an image, whilst maintaining encryption, is text such as Click here to send an e-mail to John, this duly doing this, without the need for an image or the e-mail address to be displayed. Another way the spammers try to get to you, if you have an e-mail address such as , is to bombard you with e-mails with random names in front of @whitebeertravels.com, or whatever, such as jane@whitebeertravels.com, sheila@whitebeertravels.com, etc, etc. One day, I began to get hundreds of these each day. This was very easily sorted out by auto-forwarding them to a nospam@ e-mail address supplied by Easily.co.uk , see above. Note that when clicking on the second occurence of in this paragraph (and this third one) that the Subject of the e-mail is automatically filled in, i.e. with "White Beer Travels Query". This clearly is a useful option when using this encryption routine.

Despite such precautions, e-mails with spam and/or which contain viruses slip through the net. In order to avoid getting these into my computer, prior to using my normal e-mail client, I use the "Ultrafunk Popcorn e-mail client", which allows one to look at the headers/subject of your e-mails without downloading them to your own PC. One can tick those you do not want to download and delete them from the server, so that your PC never sees them. This is a very quick and satisfying procedure. At one time Popcorn could be downloaded from the Ultrafunk website, but this closed in June, 2005. If I find an alternative source of Popcorn, I will refer to it here.

A further example of the use of JavaScript, are the links to related websites, such as the ones just above this page. This is a free-of-charge service from Google called AdSense. Money is earned each time someone clicks on these links. Google have software which selects the adverts based on the content of each page in which they are placed; they are in the language of the page, i.e. the ones on the French-language White Beer Travels Translation Service page are in French. For more details on AdSense, see https://www.google.com/adsense. At the top of this page, and all of the others making up the White Beer Travels website, there is a link which facilitates adding the White Beer Travels website to your list of Internet Favorites. This is another JavaScript application.

The main job after getting Dreamweaver, and having some idea as to how to use it, was getting the content together. John had fortunately lots of Beer Hunt recce notes and Beer Guides in Microsoft WORD format, which could be readily pasted into the emerging Web pages. With much burning of midnight oil, the site was launched in a semi-complete state on the 24th of March, 2002; all the "Under Construction" signs were removed on the 15th of April, 2002. The site at this time consisted of twenty-three separate pages, equivalent to over a 110 pages of A4, when printed. Of course, from this date, there has been much maintenance, updating and additions, which have dramatically increased the size of the site, something which is a never-ending process, so perhaps the "Under Construction" signs should be displayed permanently! In June, 2007, the White Beer Travels website had a hundred and six separate pages, the equivalent of over 650 pages of A4/Letter.

Although the annual financial outlay to Easily.co.uk is modest, they provide fast and efficient technical service. John can see why Alan recommended them. An important feature of the e-mail service that they provide is "WebMail". This allows one to send and receive e-mails from any Internet-enabled computer, anywhere in the world, without the need to dial up the ISP (Internet Service Provider) that you use in your home country.

If you want to access your company's e-mail service remotely, assuming that they use Microsoft Exchange Server, you can see the whole of your e-mails past and present (Inbox, Outbox, Sent Items, etc). This is achieved by using Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OBA), with which you can send and receive your company e-mails from any Internet-enabled computer.

The fax number used by White Beer Travels, see the Contacts page, is supplied by the Los Angeles-based eFax (j2 Global Communications) (www.efax.com). Their system is very flexible in that one option allows you to send and receive faxes as e-mails, the received ones being e-mail attachments. For a top-class layout, one can also format a fax using Microsoft WORD, and then append this as an e-mail attachment. Recipients of eFax generated faxes are totally unaware that the fax received has not been sent using a "conventional" fax machine. Provided that one uses an e-mail system that has a WebMail facility, see above, White Beer Travels can send and receive faxes using its UK fax number, from any Internet-enabled computer, anywhere in the world. This can also be done with a second eFax option for sending and receiving faxes, which involves going to a particular eFax Web page and using a password to get to your account.

Statistics for the site are automatically produced in an easy-to-read form from the site's Log Files using an excellent package from AWStats. This package is a free download from the AWStats website (awstats.sourceforge.net), although it was provided in an operational form by the company hosting the White Beer Travels website.

The AWStats package shows, for example that following the launch of the White Beer Travels site, on the 24th of March, 2002, that it received its thousandth unique visitor on the 15th of July, 2002. The total number of visits made by them was over 1,700. Note that the oft-quoted "Hits" number is a very misleading figure, i.e. it is a measure of the number of files that go to make up a page, for example, if a page has ten images on it, these alone give the page ten hits, whether they are looked at or not; the White Beer Travels site has an average of twenty-three hits per page. Clearly, a more meaningful measures of a site's popularity is the number of visits and the number of unique visitors; click here to see summary results for the White Beer Travels site. The AWStats package provides additional useful information, such as: search engine used to find the site; the name of sites linking to it; etc; etc. There is a demo of the package on the AWStats website.

This is a photo taken in 't Velootje, Ghent, Belgium. There is more than candles in this bar; scores of bicycles hang from the ceiling!

The photo above was taken in the classic Speciality Beer bar and bicycle museum, 't Velootje, in Ghent, Belgium, in May, 2001, by someone using John White's camera.

Featured in the photo on the left are the Beer Hunt reconnaissance team of, from left to right, Sylvia Clow, John White, Dr Eric Clow & John's wife, Joyce. More details on this bar are to be found in the White Beer Travels guide to Ghent, which is available from the Downloads page. Most of the photos featuring John on the site (who said there are too many in this category?) were taken by Sylvia or Joyce, both of whom, along with Eric, have been great companions on endless reconnaissance trips and on the Beer Hunts themselves. Yes, women are most welcome on the Beer Hunts and a good number rebook each year. A photo by Sylvia features in The Beer Hunter's Manual, by Kevin Trayner. Click on Links to see this photo and here for a review of this book, which also includes a photo by John's son, which is to be found on the General Beer Hunt Info page.

Image editing software, see below, was used to produce cropped and low resolution photographs for the site, such as the one above, and those at the top of this page, to speed up the downloading of the site's pages. For example, the photo in 't Velootje, Ghent above, was originally a file of size 844 Kilobytes (0.844 Megabytes), but cropping and saving at a much lower resolution has produced the 6 Kilobytes file that you see, i.e. over a 150-fold size reduction has been carried out, which should result in a download time for this photo of around only one second with a 56 kilobits per second modem connection to the Internet.

The photos manipulated include digital photos taken with a Fujifilm MX-2700 (2.3 Mega Pixels), with a Fujifilm FinePix 6900 Zoom (3.3 Mega Pixels), with a Fujifilm FinePix S602 Zoom (3.3 Mega Pixels), and with a Canon Ixus 500 (5 Mega Pixels), and scans of conventional photos.

The 6900 Zoom and its successor, the S602 Zoom, have a higher spec than the MX-2700 and a useful six-times optical zoom, but the latter, or equivalent cameras, that can fit in the pocket and which one can take pictures with on a more impromptu basis, certainly have their place, hence the purchase of the very compact, yet three-times optical zoom Canon Ixus 500 (PowerShot S500 in the US), as a replacement for the MX-2700. All produce very good photos up to A4 in size. As just stated, these are not used on this site as they would download too slowly. Should you be interested in any of the photos, please contact White Beer Travels; click here to do this by e-mail; for other contact details, click on Contact Details.

Of course, photos can be downloaded from the site by right-clicking on them, should this not be disabled by a JavaScript, but they are not really suitable for printing as a conventional photo, because of their low resolution. Should anyone wish to use photos from the site for their own website, they are welcome to do so, but please acknowledge their source. Note that should you wish to transfer large files to people and you do not want to risk clogging up their e-mail inboxes, systems such as Dropload (www.dropload.com) are worth considering. This allows you to upload a file to their system, which sends the potential recipient an e-mail telling them how to retrieve the file.

For all images (photos, logos, icons, etc), on floating the mouse's cursor over them, text (Alt Text) (pertaining to the image is displayed, this being implemented using "Alt" tags. Alt Text is recommended for all images, as it can let blind or visually impaired people get a description of the image, since Text to Speech (TTS) software can be used to convert the Alt Text into speech. Indeed, such packages convert all types of text, including the main text on a Web page into speech. A well known example is IBM Home Page Reader; click here for more information on it. All the images on the White Beer Travels website have Alt Text. Note that packages such as IBM Home Page Reader have further "Accessibility" features, since, for example, it incorporates a Microsoft Desktop Reader, to provide audible information on PC desktop items.

An equivalent of Alt Text can also be used on hyperlinks to other pages of the White Beer Travels website or to external sites. For example, if you float your cursor over the following hyperlink for the beer consumers' organisation, CAMRA, one is made aware that by clicking on it, one will go to the CAMRA website, in this example, further information being provided on CAMRA when the cursor is placed on the link: www.camra.org.uk. This feature is progressively being added to all hyperlinks in the White Beer Travels website; all hyperlinks on this Build Web page have Alt Text. For further information on accessibility, such as how to increase the displayed font size of this and all other Web pages, see the following page from AbilityNet's website: www.abilitynet.org.uk/content/accessibility/user-pref.htm. Note that some pages, such as this one, have hard-coded font size, which don't change with the most commonly used way of changing font size. However, the AbilityNet Web page quoted tells one how to get around this. Note that the hyperlink on some of the words in the pages of the White Beer Travels website are auto generated using Amazon Associates Context Links, see above.

Until getting under way with the building of the site, John did not realise that if one wished to have buttons that changed colour when one rolled the mouse over them that one had to build two separate graphic files, using an Image Editing Package. "Photoshop", from Adobe Systems (www.adobe.com), is generally regarded as the best of such software packages, but is quite expensive. However, the budget version of it, "Photoshop Elements", which often comes bundled (i.e. is free of charge) with a digital camera or scanner, is powerful enough for most users; it is the package currently used by John. Note that Amaryllis Design, pointed out that the buttons originally produced were blotchy because they were ".jpg" images. He recommended replacing them with ".gif" files, which solved the problem, with the bonus of smaller image size.

Your cursor is on a transparent gif produced from the jpg file at the top of this page

The above transparent gif was made from the non-tranparent jpg file that appears at the top of every White Beer Travels Web page (apart from the legacy version of this page!

.gif files with transparent backgrounds can readily be produced with most Image Editing Packages, these generally looking better when the Web page itself has a coloured background, as per the revamped pages of the site, such as this one. For example, the Dreamweaver image above has a transparent background, whereas the Animation Factory one below, does not.

Note that making the background of an image transparent can improve the look of a page, even for pages with white backgrounds, such as the legacy pages of this site, i.e. if the background of the image to be inserted on the page is originally coloured, it can be made transparent using image editing software.

After laboriously producing the site's original buttons, the virtues of packages such as Xara Webstyle, for building buttons and other Web graphics requirements was realised. This package integrates with Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage. A free-of-charge edition of Xara Webstyle 4 is available. The complete package is available for purchase from www.xara.com. It is possible to try it without payment for fifteen days, after which it reverts to the free-of-charge edition.

The two images required for the button, below left, were produced using the free edition of Xara Webstyle 4. More elaborate buttons are available in the edition that you have to pay for. The button takes one to the Contents page of the White Beer Travels website. This page has a brief description of the hundred and one pages that make up the site, along with links to them all; it is, essentially, the White Beer Travels Site Map. You will note that, as the mouse's cursor is placed on it, that "Alt Text" appears, see above. One can also get to the Contents page with the button, below right, this being a Dreamweaver "Flash Button". Such buttons are very quickly and easily produced within Dreamweaver MX 2004 itself, the separate images for normal (mouse off) and "mouse over" being automatically generated by the package. Unfortunately, there is no facility for adding "Alt Text" with this package alone. The advertising banner for White Beer Travels Beer Hunts, below these buttons, is an "Animated Gif", see below, produced using the trial edition of Xara Webstyle 4. As per the buttons, better banners are available with the full package. Note that, as with buttons, one can choose the banner's main colour (in this case, it is the same as the page's background) and the text colour, in this example, the latter is as per the dark red at the top and bottom of the page.

Many of the moving items in the site, such as those used on the Contacts page, are "Animated Gifs" created by the Animation Factory (www.animationfactory.com). As appropriate, they have been modified using a package that is free to use on www.gifworks.com . The amazon.co.uk and the Expedia.com ones above, were provided by these respective companies as part of their affiliate website schemes.

The guides (eBooks) that are available on the Downloads page of the site were originally Microsoft WORD documents. In downloadable form, they are in PDF (Portable Document Format, i.e. they have the file extension ".pdf"); Adobe Systems' Acrobat package can be used to do this, or other packages, costing significantly less, can be used. There is a free plug-in that comes with Microsoft Vista, but if you want to add security (password protection) to document, then one needs a package such as pdfFactory Pro, from FinePrint (www.fineprint.com).

There is a Google (www.google.com) Search Engine facility on the White Beer Travels Home page and on its Contents page, which allows both searching the whole of the World Wide Web or just the White Beer Travels website. This is Google "Free Search" obtainable from the following page of Google's site, www.google.com/services/free.html. For more information on using the Google Search Engine, click here.

John White (1945-), .

Belgian Beer, just about the world's most renowned Speciality Beer is promoted on this website, along with great beer from all over the world