About this Site

So what's the purpose of this site?

matthewpanayiotou.com is my online home meant, above all else, to serve as an experiment in web design and development. It exists foremost for me to learn and tryout different web-related technologies but also to provide a place for posting articles and photos that are of interest to me, friends and family. Over time, matthewpanayiotou.com has developed from a single page HTML/FLASH 'site' (that didn't even have a domain name, didn't validate and was by today's standards an embarrassment) into what you see in front of you using XHTML/CSS/PHP/MySQL/JS.

How did you go about putting everything together?

For the original page layout as well as all graphical aspects/elements of the site I used Adobe's Photoshop. CSS was then used to convert the layout into a format suitable for rendering in web browsers and all content is written in valid XHTML using Notepad++. The XHTML and CSS links at the bottom of each page allow you to check the validity of the markup (XHTML) and stylesheet (CSS) against the W3C recommendations.

For server-side aspects such as templating and dynamic content generation I've used PHP and the PHP link at the bottom of each page will take you to the homepage for this very powerful server-side programming language.

The site is hosted by Firefly on servers running IIS and seeing how hosting is provided as part of a connectivity package a surprisingly wide range of scripting languages is made available. For domain name registration I've used GoDaddy.com

Why do things look out of place?

This is probably because you are using an outdated browser that doesn't fully support CSS. Read the next question on how to rectify the problem.

So what's the best way of viewing this site?

My browser of choice is Firefox. It's free, less prone to security problems than many other browsers and packed with many useful features. A great alternative (sadly available only to Mac users) is Safari. Internet Explorer (both ver. 6 and by the looks of things the future ver. 7) supports the W3C standards to a much lesser degree than both Firefox and Safari and due to its large market share is more prone to security problems.