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This page provides help, advice and handy tips to help users understand how to get the most out of this website. Topics include:
Viewing
The pages on this website have been optimised for use with Internet Explorer 7.0, at a screen resolution of 1280 by 1024 pixels on a 17” screen. The website should still work adequately at other resolutions and screen sizes and with other popular Internet Browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Netscape, Opera and Safari.
The content of this website is “image rich” and is expected to be viewed at a broadband speed of 500 Kbps or better. Lower broadband speeds may result in slower response times.
The explanations and examples given below are for Explorer 7.0. Other versions or other browsers may operate slightly differently.
If you have recently viewed the site and you return to view the latest information, then remember to refresh the page(s). Click the icon with the two blue arrows to the right of the address field or just hit the F5 button on the keyboard.
Regular visitors to this website may find it useful to go to the What's New page to be directed to recent and significant additions or modifications to the website.
Pictures and Photographs
This website contains both medium (approx 640 by 480 pixels) and high (approx 1280 by 960 pixels) resolution images. Users should be aware that viewing webpages with high resolution images may take a significant time to display, even for those on relatively fast broadband.
To help minimise downloading delays, most pictures and photographs are initially displayed either as small thumbnails or at medium resolution, which if clicked on will expand to a separate full page with a larger resolution picture. To return to the previous web page after displaying such a picture, then click on the leftmost blue Back button.
Pop-up Pages
Accessing an external website or a separate PDF file from this website may create a separate “Pop-up” window. This window is typically at a reduced size, as shown below for the example of accessing the Goring Unplugged website. Note: Users may need to enable the “pop up” capability on their web browser.
If users wish to view an external website as a full page, click the top middle button (little square) at the top right of the page. Cancel the page by clicking the top right button (little cross) if viewing the pop up page is no longer required.
Printing
Should you wish to print a page from this site you will need to do so in landscape orientation, rather than portrait. From the File pull down menu, select Page Setup, then click the Landscape button at the bottom left of the dialogue box. You can then check if this is correct by selecting Print Preview before selecting Print.
Saving Photos
You may save photographs from this site, as long as you only use them your own personal use and do not republish them elsewhere.
For permission to use material from this site please contact: contact@goring-on-thames.co.uk.
To save a photograph, select the photograph at the resolution required, right click on it and then select “Save Image As”.
Please note that there are instances where the facility for saving an image has been inhibited. In such cases please take note of the copyright details.
Adobe Reader
The Goring-on-Thames portal provides some downloadable information in PDF format. In order to ensure that these downloaded files can be successfully viewed, users should ensure that they have downloaded a free copy of the latest version of Adobe Reader by clicking on the URL below.
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2_allversions.html
Then select the appropriate version corresponding to the operating system:
Google Searches
As stated on the Publication Policy page, this website is regularly submitted to Google and reasonable steps are taken to encourage Google to give a high search rating to all pages. However, we can take no responsibility for the keywords entered by a Google user, nor can we influence the results produced by Google. Please note that it can take several weeks for a new or altered page to be found by Google.
For those who are interested or concerned, a brief overview of how the Google search engine works is provided below.
The Google crawler, known as Googlebot crawls the entire web regularly in order to update its search index, which is based on the information found on the individual pages of the various websites. This cycle can take several weeks and there is no guarantee that a particular website will be included. Google clearly state that “We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear”.
When a Google user performs a search and enters a number of Keywords, Google searches the Google Index for matches. Note that Google doesn’t actually search the web, and will only find a particular page if has been previously entered into the index by the Googlebot.
Google then displays a particular page that it finds according to a ranking relative to the other pages it has also found. The ranking is decided by Google and is based on a complex assessment of how interesting Google thinks that particular page is. This is strongly influenced by the content of the page and the website as a whole. It is not based on the number of actual “hits” on a particular website, but more on the potential for a high number of hits as assessed by Google.
The results are highly dependent on the key words entered by the Google user. This is best illustrated by two simple examples.
The first example has entered the two key words “goring tennis”. At the time of performing this example, there were some 16,000 sites in the UK with these two key words. Bear in mind that there are two towns called Goring, that it is also a popular surname and that Tennis is a reasonably popular sport. It therefore took many months for the website www.goring-tennis.co.uk to percolate slowly to the top of the search page against the particular search submission shown below.
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The second example has entered the two keywords “goring-on-thames westholme”. At the time of performing this example, there were only some 25 sites in the UK with these two key words. Bear in mind that there is only one town called Goring-on-Thames and that Westholme is an unusual name. It therefore only took the time for the first Googlebot crawl to find the new web page for Westholme Store, www.goring-on-thames.co.uk/html/westholme_store.html, on this website and for it to become top of the first page against that particular search submission shown below.
Google Maps
Depending on the URL (Address) used to access this website, the Google Map(s) may not work. You may see the error report below.
Simply click OK and the page will load, but without the Google Map. Then click on the redirection link.
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