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Nearly seven years before we wrote the first page of our Virtual Museum we started to research. Company archives, minutes of Board Meetings stretching back to 1908 - some of them handwritten, letters, diaries, you name it. It was all part of the preparations for our 90th birthday celebrations in 1999. That was just the start. It was soon clear that in days gone by Woolworths had a strong sense of tradition, and many colleagues past and present had collected staff magazines, press stories, albums of photographs and fond memories - in some cases spanning several generations of employees from the same family, right back to World War I. Thanks to today's generation, those core values and pride in the brand are back - stronger than ever. Behind the glitz of multimedia - the highly compressed, fast downloading graphics, digital MP3s and AVIs - there are literally thousands of documents, millions of photographs, a thousand hours of video, not to mention many hours at the wind-up gramophone. If you're working on a project or thesis, we know how hard it can be ! |
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The screen layout and design has evolved since we started work, as we got to grips with the immense amount of content at our disposal. We've tried to strike a balance between visual appeal and downloading time, and to make it easy to navigate around the site, dip in, or search for specifics. |
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| The pages were written in Microsoft Front Page 2000, using page templates we designed ourselves. We designed our own approach to navigation buttons, frames and graphic design. With the exception of the quiz exhibits at the end of each gallery, we've steered clear of Java and other applets, and stuck with HTML. We've not encoded or source-protected any of the pages, and we don't send you any advertising or cookies when you come to visit. | ||||
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Before each page was written we prepared an outline of the editorial, researched our wide range of documents and products and prepared the graphical and multimedia content. We used Corel Photo-Paint and CorelDraw Version 11 and later Version 12 to get the images ready for the web - sizing them to fit the pages, sharpening them for greater clarity and eliminating superfluous background detail. Most of the images in the Museum are in 72dpi JPEG (Joint Picture Experts Group) format, with animations held in GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) as the same resolution. |
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| Most present day photographs were shot on a Canon Cyber-shot digital camera at 1600x1200 pixels and then cropped and scaled to fit. Some shots were grabbed from video material shot on Canon XL1S high resolution digital video. Audio files were individually optimised to give fast download and reasonable quality (typical 11,025 KHz Mono) for WAV files and much higher quality MP3 files (which are by their nature much smaller and faster to download, even in high quality). We used Creative Wave Studio to prepare the audio content. The various animations and video elements were prepared in Adobe Premiere 6.5 or Adobe After Effects 5.5. | ||||
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The Virtual Museum is hosted for Woolworths by Streets on Line, Woolworths Group's specialist e-commerce arm. It uses Microsoft IIS and Front Page Extensions. We hope you enjoy you visit to our Virtual Museum and will find what you're looking for. If you have feedback or ideas about how the site could be improved, you're welcome to drop us a line, mailto:Virtual.Museum@woolworths.co.uk, or click this link to visit our feedback information page. |
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Background
to the Virtual Museum Contributors
and credits |
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