Hello, and welcome to my home page! My name is Ryan Beard and this is my web site. The main reason for me creating this was just to learn a bit about web site design, to provide a site on the Internet where potential employers can see my curriculum vitae and learn a little more about me. But at the same time, it has given me the opportunity to tell the World about myself (although I doubt anyone really cares!).

I'm 23, English with blonde hair and blue eyes. I enjoy playing football when I get the chance, although I'm not so fit at at the moment. That's what comes from working in an office.

I studied Computer Science at De Montfort University in Leicester for four years, which included a placement year where I worked at Microsoft. The course was fairly decent and covered a number of different topics. Over time I realised that programming was the aspect of the course I enjoyed more than any other, and in the years spent by a computer I've learnt several languages (C, Modula-2, Smalltalk, Haskell, Java JDK 1.2.2, Visual Basic 5 & 6, VBA and JavaScript). I'm probably most comfortable with JavaScript 1.1 at the moment, as this is the language I have been using most recently at work, although I'm comfortable with Java as this was the language I used to write my final year project in, I'd like to think I'm pretty competent in VB too.

I have lots of friends all over the place. Consequently I don't get to see some of them as often as I would like to, and I'm rubbish at keeping in touch. Bad combination really. My home town is Chelmsford in Essex, which is quite a nice place I suppose. Not the biggest town in the World, but big enough to have plenty of fun. I like to go out clubbing and out on the town, Chelmsford is okay for that, but sometimes it's nicer to get away and try somewhere new.

I have a younger sister called Jessica who is 14. She has long blonde hair, and is very tall for her age. I also have an older brother called Oliver who is 27. He used to irritate the hell out of me when I was little, but now we're good friends and quite often go out together either to pubs or to play snooker.

Web Design

I created this web page so I could get more comfortable with web site design, purely a personal interest really, but it also gives me the opportunity to provide a little information to potential employers about myself.

This web page was written using FrontPage 2000, not a bad tool, but now I'm confident with JavaScript and HTML, I would probably write this using a lower-level IDE. FrontPage is very IE oriented (not surprisingly) and there isn't an amazing amount of functionality and flexibility, but its not bad for a start.

I created a large background image using Paint Shop Pro 6, and chopped it into several smaller ones. I then placed these images into a complex table layout. Frustrating, but to allow for content and rollover images, it was necessary.

I wanted to do something slightly different to the normal navigation you see in web pages, after all, the beauty of the web is freedom of expression and imagination. As you can see, I didn't feel like being too imaginative, but at least it's different to clicking on a navigation bar on the left hand side.

I also felt it was important to keep the design fairly simple and consistent, you don't want to wait ages for a page to download, and you want to be able to see contents clearly. So I created some small graphics and kept a simple format for text using a stylesheet and displaying black writing on a white background. Generally this is a good idea as people sometimes wish to print web pages and can often use a lot of ink because of excess colour on the web page.

Although it's nothing special, I'm quite happy with how it has turned out.

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