About the Findley's driving school website
This website is provided as an online supplement to your regular lessons.
As a service to the general public. This knowledge is provided on a free to use basis without any annoying pop-ups, passwords or data mining techniques.
Development: -
This site is continually being developed to provide more useful information to its users. There are currently over 300 pages of content available and my intention is that the resource will continue to evolve so that as well as adding fresh content, more useful sections will be added as users require them.
The purpose of the site is to provide useful information to pupils from anywhere in the UK, whom-so-ever they may be taught by, so that they can look up information between driving lessons, thereby re-enforcing and increasing the effectiveness of each driving lesson. This is a very effective way of topping up their knowledge. I know, as a practising driving instructor, that if pupils do some sort of revision between lessons then they improve quicker because their understanding continues to expand rather than being allowed to stagnate.
How to use: -
I would recommend that pupils simply look up any topics that they have already covered with their instructor which are listed in the 'Practical Tutorials' section. The benefit is that when they return to their instruction vehicle they will be up to date, instead of the instructor having to constantly remind them of things that they knew the previous lesson but have since forgotten. A simple idea and therefore a good one.
The other sections are their for referal on an as needed basis. The 'Articles' section is full of good advice that would not necessarily be covered in a lesson brief. No-one who intends to drive in the UK should fail to read the 'Highway Code'. General interest may mean that you forage around the site a little to find more interesting articles. Who knows?
Popularity: -
It is evident simply from the number of pages served each week (approx 6,000 pages per week. Figures provided are correct up to July 2007) that this site appeals to more than just the pupils of Findley's driving school. If you are visiting from another source then rest assured that you are most welcome. The site is provided as a public service as much as anything else.
The site is provided in a mainly text only format to save on costs. The growing popularity that the site enjoys is leading to a continual increase in the number of pages served. The number and size of pictures on a page increases the amount of time that a page takes to download and also therefore the amount of bandwidth that is used. Findley's Driving School totally supports the costs incurred in maintaining this site as well as the day to day costs associated with providing it and intends to continue doing so.
Technical: -
At the moment the vast majority of the pages that you will find on this website are coded in XHTML 1.0 STRICT. Standard XHTML files with a .html file extension that are passed on from the server directly to your browser along with a Cascading Style Sheet level 2 (CSS2). The XHTML contains the content and the CSS2 sheet contains the presentation details. The address of these pages will be whatever.html
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has defined other markup languages which allow a more semantic representation of data and presentation. I am not going to try to explain this concept in full here because this is not a programming website but there are considerable advantages of such an approach.
If you look in your browser at the top of this page you will see that the address ends in .html. The raw data is contained in an xml document which is transformed using an XSLT transformation stylesheet to become an XHTML document rendered by a CSS2 stylesheet. It is my intention to rewrite this entire site in the XML format once transformation of the stylesheets can be performed uniformly on the client-side across the different browsers. XML support at the moment is sketchy. The benefits far outweigh the cost in time that is incurred by such a task. It will take ages to complete the job but future maintainance and expansion of the site will be easier than before.
The file types above are or will be applied to each other in your browser as and when development allows.
Some pages have an address that ends in .asp. This is a proprietory filetype created by Microsoft. The server that hosts this site has a Microsoft package installed on it that enables processing to be done on the server. Such pages are generated on the server and only the xhtml and css files are sent to your browser for rendering. Using server side technology allows me to provide extra functionality when I need it that is unavailable from the browser alone.
Sometimes I use a program called 'Macromedia FLASH MX 2004 Professional' to create animations or effects that I need to provide enhancements for certain pages. This feature will increase as the time becomes available to me.
To sum up: -
This site is a mix of XHTML 1.0 strict, CSS level 2, .ASP, XML, SVG, XPATH, XLINK, XSL Transformation stylesheets, FLASH MX 2004 Professional, and a lot of hard work.
If you think that writing, maintaining and improving a website of this size is easy then you are mistaken.
If there is anything that you wish to know then remember, if you don't ask; you don't get!
If you have any questions at all about the site then please direct them to Findley's
where I will be happy to respond to them.
