Inclusions
The site is centred on British Swimming Competitions and includes
material related to, and promoting those competitions.
Typically, for each competition, it provides information on:
Further competition-related information may be added in future.
Exclusions
This site does not cover details of:
Avoidance of Content Bias
All competing swimmers and competitions are treated as equally as possible.
This means that relatively "unknown" competitors and competitions
are given the same coverage as the top swimmers and competitions.
Avoidance of Duplication
In keeping with the original philosopy of the web, it is the
intention of this site to avoid duplicating material that
is provided elsewhere. Where such information is known to be on-line,
links will be used to reference it. There is no guarantee
that such information will be maintained indefinitely by
its originators.
Also this site tries to avoid competing with printed material
such as Swimming Times, UK Swimming and Watermarks, although some
overlap is inevitable. This is achieved partly by taking advantage of:
Processing of Comments
Readers comments (made via the on-line comment box) and any other
E-mail will be read regularly (daily when possible) and actions
resulting from the comments will be taken as soon as possible.
Processing/Priority of Contributions
Organisers contributions will be dealt with as soon as possible.
Priorities will be given in the following order:
Top:
1) Correction of errors
2) Publication of organisers' emergency notices, e.g. "meet cancelled"
3) Publishing of competition programmes, conditions and entry forms,
with the most immediate dates getting priority
4) Publishing of results
5) Routine Website revisions, e.g. revising date-based lists
6) Publishing of swimmers contributions, e.g photographs, etc.
7) Publishing of multimedia reviews of competitions
8) Site development (new facilities)
9) Other related activities, e.g. response to specific requests
Bottom.
Design Principles
The design will be kept as simple as possible with a view to making
it usable to as many swimmers/readers as possible and to
attract overseas visitors to swim in Britain.
Web Pages
The site can be used with simple text-only browsers or
with browsers with pictures switched off (which gives quicker access).
To help readers, pictures and other images have an
alternative text representation (i.e. an ALT= description).
Pages can adjust to any page width or screen size. This minimised the amount of horizontal scrolling needed and facilitates use by palmtop sized computers. The number of fonts is kept to a minimum (primarily using Times Roman, Prestige and Arial).
Web pages, photos, video clips and other media will be kept as small as possible to speed transmission. Compression techniques will be widely used.
Site Navigation can be achieved by clicking on underlined "hyperlinks" and browser "BACK" controls only. For this reason, the use of "frames" is avoided. Virtual worlds are navigated by additional movement controls as appropriate to each world, e.g. see pool panoramas.
The site can be automatically translated into as many languages as possible (6 at present including English). For this reason, the use of pictures, logos, diagrams, etc (e.g. .GIF files) containing text is avoided because such text would not get translated.
The use of state-of-the-art technologies will be minimised or localised (e.g. to the multimedia section).
Frames are only used on a few (less important) pages.
Warnings
Warnings are given on hyperlinks before reading:
Printed Output
Pages that users may wish to print have dark (or black) writing
on a light (or white) background and are of a size that can be printed
on A4 portrait paper without adjusting the default text size.
There are a few sets of results where the text size may need to be
reduced in order to print them.
Landscape is avoided.
This is achieved by presenting landscape forms, maps, etc. on their side.
They are a bit difficult to read online but the use of
portrait-only avoids the need for users to re-configure their printers.
HTML
The site uses a subset HTML that works consistently on as
many browsers as possible.
Pages are tested on a variety of browsers before being
uploaded to the web to help ensure that they are displayed
consistently.
The HTML used does not comply with a specific WWW Committee standard.
Proprietary Formats
Some proprietary multimedia formats are/may be used in areas
of the website where this is expected (e.g. multimedia section).
The use of proprietary formats will not prevent access to useful
information.
The formats include:
Because of their large size, minimal use of the following formats:
Additionally, where organisers provide files in these formats:
To get the benefit of these formats, you will need the software
to display/play the media. Some of the software can be obtained
by down loading from the Internet. Some of it (marked) is free.
To download, see the Technology Links page.