Llandeilo Past and Present

Terry Norman

Crime-buster, super-hero and theoretical physicist extraordinaire, Terry Norman turned down the title role in the latest Bond movie, and earlier had suggested Tom Cruise as the star of the Top Gun films instead of him. Citing burn-out as the reason, he decided to abandon the life of a mega-star, hell-raiser and stud to countless Hollywood beauties and return to Wales to concentrate on his local history studies instead. After assisting Stephen Hawkins with his work on black holes, and ghost-writing 'A Brief History of Time' for him, he returned to his native Ammanford to concentrate on his greenhouse.

“Tomatoes are what fascinate me now”, he said enigmatically when CNN tracked him down to his remote west Wales hide-out, adding:

"After the police called me in to solve the Yorkshire Ripper case for them I started to get bored. I did help NASA to deflect a gigantic asteroid which would have obliterated the Earth, but they had to literally beg me to save the human race. The thing is, after you've achieved everything I have, what else is there to do? It was only when I got the call from Andy Mabbutt, who pleaded with me to end my self-imposed exile and assist in the design of a Llandeilo website, that I finally relented. Only Andy could have persuaded me to return to the fold; Bush and Blair tried but I hate those two for their privileged upbringings. I was brought up by wolves and I'm self-taught in everything I know. I didn't have an expensive public school education, followed by Ivy League universities, like those two clowns, and it didn't do me any harm, I can tell you."

Offers for serialisation, book, film and karaoke rights are invited for the website when it goes live later this year.

Terry comes from Ammanford and researched and designed the authoritative and exhaustive Ammanford Town website. He is secretary of the Ammanford and District Archaeological and History Society, which includes the Llandeilo area in its interests.

Andrew Mabbutt

Andrew runs the succesful web design business, Pontbren Web Services. He first set up a community web site for the village of Cilycwm ten years ago and had wanted to do something similar for Llandeilo after moving here eight years ago. The problem was he couldn't undertake such a huge project alone - he needed a super-hero!

A chance meeting with Terry Norman provided Andrew with the perfect opportunity to indulge in his passion for coding and photography while conveniently dumping Terry with all the research and footwork.

Andrew descibes himself as a Web Standards Evangelist and expert in Accessible Web Sites. “The plethera of poorly designed, non-standards compliant web sites that are inaccessible to people with disabilities is a disgrace” he says. That many of these are funded by grants or other public funds is enough to drive him to drink (Evans Evans Cwrw !).

One of the major design challenges of the site was to make it accessible to people with disabilities (such as poor eyesight, inability to use a mouse etc). To meet this challenge the site would have to be usable regardless of the browsing device (web browser, screen-reader, Braille pad, mobile phone, PDA etc) and regardless of the ability/disability of the user. Why you may ask? “If I'm going to spend hundreds of hours creating a web site” says Andrew “I want everybody to be able to 'see' it”. With over 7 million people in the UK having some sort of disability (and over 50 million in the U.S.) the business case for accessibility is a powerful as the ethical one.

As Andrew also points out standards driven, accessible web sites are faster, easier to maintain, forward compatible and do better with search engines.

Andrew is available for seminars and conferences to discuss the importance of Web Standards and/or Accessibility to online business success. Training days can also be arranged for Web Site Designers.