About the Website

Structure & Navigation

The SFCA website contains

a number of static pages, accessed from the home page
pages showing the details of the claims
pages showng the locations of the claims

The website allows a variety of ways of moving around between pages with different information about a particular claim, and between similar information about different claims.

The claims in the Sheffield Flood Claims Archive are of three types:

Claims for Damage to Property (from registers 1–8)
Claims for Injury to People (from register 9b)
Claims for Loss of Life (from register 9a)

Some of the claims for Damage to Property also had:

Amended claims (in register 10) – where ...
Appendices to claims (in register 11) – for further information about claims which were too detailed for the main registers

The navigation between the pages in the website reflect these relationships between the claims, and can be summarised as follows:

Website structure navigational diagram

Presentation of claim particulars

The presentation of the Particulars attempts to be faithful to the original registers as far as possible. The original entry in the register for claim 2582 looked like this:

Image of original claim

On the website, what was on the left-hand page (name, description and address) is shown at the top, and the corresponding right-hand page, with the details of the particulars of the claim and the amounts being claimed, is shown below:

Claim as presented in website

Behind the Scenes

Warning! This section will only be interesting if you know something of HTML and are interested in how the HTML pages are built from information stored in a database.

The website uses Macromedia ColdFusion to create web pages from information stored in the database of flood claims.

For a fragment of a claim’s particulars which might look like this:

Particulars of Claim	Amount Claimed
Damage to Stock in Trade	£8 2s 6d
Cleaning of House	£1
Loss of Business	£1

The HTML will look like this (somewhat simplified from the actual page):

And the ColdFusion template will look like this, with the ColdFusion elements highlighted in red:

The cfquery tag specifies what information will be extracted from the database, using the SQL database query language. In this case, the query is filtered according to the claim reference passed as part of the URL, for example claim=1-9.
The cfoutput tag repeatedly loops through the results of the query. For each line of the claim particulars returned from the database, it generates a row of the table, outputting the Description field, then the amount of the line of the claim, as £sd.

Working in Macromedia Dreamweaver means that the raw HTML can be avoided, for the most part (though it is still valuable to be able to make sense of it and sometimes tweak it). In the Dreamweaver Design View, the HTML shown above appears as the rather more friendly:

Particulars of Claim	Amount Claimed
#Description#	£#L# #S#s #D#d

The second row of the table is marked as a Repeat Region, and the ‘#’ variables are simply dragged from a list of available database fields and dropped onto the appropriate position.

Chris Veness, Movable Type

This website is written in HTML 4.01

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