The site is called www.rowan-cottage.co.uk. It was set up at the end of February in a matter of a few weeks. None of us is called Rowan Cottage, or Rowan. Nor is it Rowan’s Cottage. We tend to avoid using our own names as domain names in this little reserved country of ours!
Rowan Cottage is in fact the name of our house. It’s our home, not a holiday cottage!
This is a small family site, with some extras. If you are looking for a high technology site which complies with all validation and accessibility guidelines and web standards from W3C, WSG and WAI then you’ve in fact come to the wrong place. If you’ve come to spout on about iWeb’s HTML markup or the fact that this site looks remarkably similar to some other site you’ve seen, then your comments will fall on deaf ears. The ‘webmaster’ here actually has a real full-time job.
This site is really just a personal expression of ourselves and for the use of family and friends. And by friends, I extend the definition to include the whole iWeb using community.
Rowan Cottage
Our home is nearly 160 years old and was formerly one of the major smallholdings in our village, before all the land was sold off for housing. It has been extended to over the years, but it still retains the character of (and enough of a scrap of land to be) a country cottage, and yes, we do have an Aga. Well, you can’t have a cottage in the country and not have an Aga can you? BTW, we didn’t have the Aga fitted - it was installed by the previous owners.
We’ve spent the last 10 years trying to get it straight - we’re still not done. Being an old property, we’ve just about replaced nearly everything in the house, or added to it in some fashion, from windows, skylights, rendering, paving, cavity wall insulation, roof insulation, bathroom, electric gates, garage doors, garden pond, etc etc.
About Us
Our family comprises Imogen (daughter), Elliot (son), Mum, Dad and Jill (dog). We lost Jack a few years ago (yes, we know, two jack russell terriers called Jack and Jill and a house in the country, how clichéd). We are a young family (OK, so mum and dad were busy for quite a while before deciding to settle down), but our attitude is still ‘young at heart’. We hope we have a fairly relaxed attitude to life (see our philosophy at top left) and don’t get too stressed about stuff - we see enough of that rubbish at work and on the school run).
We hold great store to experiences and memories and our children always come first and foremost in whatever we do. We trust you can see this in our work.
Anyway, have a browse through the site, we hope you find what you’re looking for...
What’s here
Well, our domain was just hanging around doing nothing much. You may have seen the Chill Out Dudes page for over a year. I thought it was time to get going with it. Anyway it keeps my hand in this ‘tinternet lark. It’s a bit of fun isn’t it?
In keeping with the fun aspect, why not tell everybody else (and us) that you’ve been to Rowan Cottage and push a virtual pin into our Guestmap!
There are various iWeb related articles and also various shop links (see right column). We’ve got the usual photo albums and videos of the kids that you’d expect from a site like this.
We’ve also put some pictures of our craft, just in case you might want to ask us to make something for you. Well you never know....
If you need to find something on the site, check out our sitemap and search facility.
Because there is a lot of media on the site, loading times may well be a little slow. Where possible I have downgraded the quality of pictures as a compromise, and used efficient movie compression codecs. Because of this certain
aspects of the site may be unsuitable for dial-up users. In addition you will need flash player, Quicktime 7 and iTunes. Javascript is used throughout the site and for best results is best left activated in your browser.
This site makes extensive use of CSS and PNG graphics. For best results on a PC we recommend the use of Firefox rather than Internet Explorer.
DISCLAIMER We will not be held responsible for any nausea or retching suffered during the browsing of this site. Please keep your gag reflexes to yourself at this time. This project is purely some sort of experiment to see if the website thingy works. In time I will try some more adventurous page set-ups but time is a bit limited currently. Anyway, design goes out of the window when you’ve got kids. And a full-time job. Trust me.