I needed quite a bit of help to put this site together.  Prior to this I've only ever used CSS to set up a few fonts and colours for headers and titles, that sort of thing.  Never to design a whole site: its buttons, menus, layout.  Not a table in sight.  Wonderful.  I haven't tried to validate it yet - it's only a little site for my (and your!) personal enjoyment so I don't really care whether it validates.

CSSPLaY

First and foremost, I owe an extreme debt of gratitude to Stu Nichols at CSSPLaY.  His site is a total cornucopia of goodies for anyone wondering how to do something in CSS and the guy must spend hours working out new stuff and polishing old stuff.  So Stu: thanks.  Particular elements of this site whose design was inspired and assisted (or even borrowed wholesale) from CSSPLaY include:

CSS Creator

Thankfully, there's a host of top information on the web about CSS, the standard; usage; pitfalls; good practice; etc.  Of these, one of the best I've found is CSS Creator - particularly their support forum.  I found the answers to half-a-dozen problems here simply by reading FAQs and previous posts, but in the end when I did have to ask a question of my own, the gurus had an answer for me within a day.  Thanks guys!

Evrsoft 1st Page

This is a qualified thanks.  For years, I had used only MS Frontpage for web design.  I know, I know...I'm sorry.  I struggled with the execrable Frontpage Express for my first site, until I got sick of it doing unusual and unexpected changes from one session to the next.  Fortunately (you may disagree) I got hold of a copy of the full version with MS Office Pro and so continued to use it for another six years.  I even bragged about using it on my original home page, with one of those little graphics in the bottom corner.

But you can't design in CSS and use Frontpage.  It's like trying to explain Relativity to a three-year-old.  So, casting about for a "real" HTML editor, I happened upon 1st Page 2000.  Downloaded it, played about with it a little and decided I liked it.  Had I stuck with it, all would have been well.  However, I left the tool in my toolbox for a couple of months while I settled on an overall design idea for the site and read up a bit about CSS.  By the time I got to the stage of implementing the first page, 1st Page had "grown up" into 1st Page 2006.  "Wow!" I thought - reading some of the posts from the three million users of the earlier version and how LONG they'd all been waiting, salivating, for this upgrade.  Like a lamb to the slaughter I downloaded it and started playing.  I loved it!  So much better than 2000.  OK, it was a bit buggy and the editor had some pretty idiosyncratic behaviour but the new features made up for that and after all, it was only just out of beta.  A couple of days in and OK, it's a lot buggy, but at least there's an active support forum for bug reporting and workarounds.  Another week in and...what's this?...it's started putting up a nag screen on launch with one of those REALLY ANNOYING delayed-activation OK buttons, but I can get rid of this if I pay for the full "professional" version.  And it's started hanging up regularly - and I mean like every other day.  It just stops.  Right in the middle of typing.

At the time of writing (May 2006) the support forum for 1st Page 2006 has been taken down and has been down for a couple of months.  Several people had complained of paying for the professional version to stop the nag screen but not receiving a licence key or any replies to emails even though their money was taken.  The Evrsoft homepage still trumpets 1st Page 2000 as "the world's free HTML editor!" and there is NO mention of 1st Page 2006 anywhere.  You can find it on their products page and it is still available for download, although strangely 1st Page 2000 is listed first, above 2006.

So while these are both great products, my recommendation for now would be to stick with 2000 until the buggy version of 2006 is fixed (and given that there was a SIX YEAR wait for it to be released in the first place I wouldn't hold your breath).  To my mind it is little better than a late beta and if it wasn't already too late for me (I've gotten used to the interface and come to rely too heavily on some of the new features) I would go back to 2000 which was almost totally stable and bug-free.

Oxford University Computing Services

Grateful thanks to the library archive at OUCS for the photos of old ICL 2900 series mainframe equipment that appear on my computing page.