Please read this page carefully as it will explain some of the technologies used by British Garden Birds and may help in sorting out any problems that you may be experiencing during your visit.
The following technologies are used:
Display Settings
The web pages have been designed to be used with your screen area set to 800 x 600 pixels or higher. If you have a smaller screen area, or you do not like the contents frame on the left-hand side, then you may use the frameless version of British Garden Birds.
The photographs look their best with your screen using 65536 colours (also known as 64K, 24-bit or True Color).
Cascaded Style Sheets (CSS)
This is an evolving technology that controls how pages look.
Unfortunately, some earlier browsers do not fully or correctly support it, however, the pages on this web site should degrade gracefully so as not to hinder your visit.
JavaScript
This is used to display photographs and play sound clips in separate windows.
If your browser does not support JavaScript, there is usually an alternative hyperlink that will take you to the photograph or sound clip in the same browser window. The exception is the quiz which makes extensive use of JavaScript and there is no alternative.
If you have Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2, the Information Bar may suppress the JavaScript owing to a pop-up window being created by the script. To allow these pop-up windows, add www.garden-birds.co.uk to the Trusted Sites Zone.
Apple QuickTime Movies
This is a free plug-in from Apple for your browser that is used to play the sound recordings of the different bird species. Look for the symbol.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 SP2 (and later) on Windows no longer supports Netscape plug-ins. This means that the QuickTime does not work. The solution is to install the free QuickTime ActiveX component.
If the plug-in or ActiveX component is working, you should be able to play the following "Welcome to British Garden Birds" sound clip:
If it does not play, you need to either download the plug-in or install the ActiveX component (which should download automatically) from Apple QuickTime.
If you have Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2, the Information Bar may suppress the ActiveX control, but allow you to either install or run the control.
Alternatively, try playing the mp3 sound file with Microsoft Windows Media Player or other media player software.
Apple Quicktime does not support Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit platforms. Try
Quicktime Alternative instead.
Microsoft Windows Media Player Microsoft Windows Media Player is free software for playing audio and video on personal computers running Microsoft Windows. You may use this to play the mp3 sound files on this website.
British Garden Birds has been tested with the following browsers on Microsoft Windows operating systems (including 95, 98 SE, NT 4 Workstation, 2000 Professional and XP Professional (including SP3),
Vista x64 (SP1)) and no significant problems were noticed:
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8
Mozilla Firefox 1.0, 2.0,
3.0, 7.0, 11.0 and 12.0
Visitors have reported having no problems with the following combinations:
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5
Mac "Safari" browser using Mac OS X Panther
Internet Explorer browser using Windows Mobile 2003
symbol.