Behind the scenes

There were many (some may say interesting) technical things to overcome while building this site.

Here I will write some brief tales of how these issues were overcome.
Be sure to check beck regularly for updates.

Colours

You may have noticed that every page is a different colour even the same page if you refresh your browser.
Creating random colours is relatively easy. Creating everything that goes with it is where it gets tricky.
First code was written in php which generates a random number from 17 to 255 for red, green and blue. The reason we start at 17 is to eliminate the chance of very dark colours which would effect legibility.

This was fine for the old website but since the revision new headings require a shade darker and a shade lighter. There is no easy way to adjust RGB values for different shades so these values have to be converted into HSL - Hue Saturation and Lightness. Adjusting the colour is now easy and a lighter and darker shade of the main colour is stored. CSS3 has the ability to handle HSL values but as most peoples browsers cannot the three colours have to be converted back to RGB. The three colours now have to be converted into hex values for the CSS to use.

Of course that is only half the story. We have the 'wallpaper' and shadow images to think about along with the main menu rollovers. These are PNG images. PNGs are great as they allow not only transparent pixels, like GIFs, but also have an alpha channel which allow each pixel to have a level of transparency of their own. Overlay these on top of a block of colour and you have a coloured image.
Like many things there is a drawback - or two. The first is the file size. 24bit PNGs can have quite large file sizes and so need to be used sparingly. The second is that older browsers (particularly IE6) do not like them. There is a hack to get around this which has been used in places but it too has its limitations in that the hack does not allow for tiled images. AS such the menu, for example, looks fine in IE6 but the main background which is tiled had to be altered to a generic image.