I'm a local contact for the Vegan Society so, in short, this is about making life for those with similar aims better.

A bit more detail ...

I was putting a lot of time into the Thames Valley Vegans web site and formalising its structure would ultimately save our group time.

Secondly, it was obvious that most groups, especially small ones, did not have the time or resources to build their own sites, so LVW would prove very useful for them.

Thirdly, I noticed there are many 'the ultimate veggie guides to the world' web sites out there on the net with little content. Why, I thought, would anyone want to spend their time writing content for someone else's site if they had no stake in it? LVW side steps this by giving people their own sites, and that I thought, would be the motivation for creating really good content. Site owners so often forget that its the site's content that makes it useful - a pretty site that never changes is visited twice and forgotten.

It is only an active local veggie that can give a site the detail it needs to be useful. What is a guy in New York going to know about the best place to eat it a small town in Yorkshire, and visa-versa?

Any one wanting to run a local veggie group. Young or old.

Sure, you'll just won't be making much use of the events section. But an LVW site would be great for spreading your local knowledge. Perhaps you have more need of a LVW site than a group, as you're own your own. And with such a great site, perhaps you soon will have a group!

• Is your site richer in features?
• Do you have someone dedicated to developing your site?
• Is it all for free?
• How long does it take you to add something to your site? About as long as the time taken to type the information in?
• Can you work as a team?
• Can you change your site's look when ever you want?

If your answer is 'no' to any of these questions then perhaps a LVW would be good for you.

LVW is designed for the dissemination of local knowledge that about being veggie. Some of those features might not be of use to other styles of sites - that can just be turned off.

LVW structure is flexible enough to accommodate most modest web sites needs.

If you are unsure then just contact me with your idea.

Here are two examples of non-local sites:

• Veggie Snow
• Super Vegans
• Faceless Musick
• Mid Summer House Shame

No. LVW is for positive campaigning. If you wish to run a hate site, LVW is not for you. If you aim to instigate violence or libel against organisations or individuals LVW would not be happy to host your site. I just don't have time for that sort of hassle regardless of how worth while the cause.

Follow your heart – join them all!

Basically, from your perspective as an administrator, LVW is a load of web forms. You enter the data and LVW then displays it on your site in a structured and attractive way.

Not a great idea. Try working together – LVW allows a site to be managed by multiple people.

If you think you can do a better job of it, then why not. As long as you put the effort into the content, the LVW site should be better. The existing site owner may be glad to have someone take over the web site of things. Best to chat to them about it.

Drop me a line and I can dump that data your require into a spread sheet.

You can not own information, so you are free to do as you wish with it, and so is anyone else.

The editorial you put around your information is implicitly copyrighted by yourself, so no one should just copy and paste your editorial without your permission.

If you are happy for others to use your work, state it on your site. I only own the LVW framework (the code).

At the moment nothing. But as the data grows it will be used to further enhance LVW by collating, say, event details to give a UK wide event listing, and UK wide 'locations' listing.

When such features appear that information will always link back into the LVW site that created it, so as to give credit to those who have done the hard work of collecting it.

LVW is ultimately a community based project and what ever comes from LVW will hopefully be a great asset for the veggies everywhere.

Write your own site from scratch. The IVU offers free web space, but that's it - you're on your own - and you have no standard web technologies available to you. Even the best developer could not make a web site anywhere near as rich as an LVW site on IVU.

Get someone to write it for you. How would YOU update it when they've done it? Unless the site has an extensive and easy to use configuration tool behind it, you may end up in an awkward situation of having a great site you can not change. Some very large very groups have come a cropper when their web master has moved on. With LVW, you are the web master.

LVW has by far the richest functionality of any local group site, and improving all the time, and exceeds the capabilities, in many ways, that of the larger organisations' web sites.

There are many great generic content management system (see www.freshmeat.net for examples). You would still need to do a lot of bespoke programming to get it anywhere near to what LVW already does. If you want the challenge then there's some great software you can use, an eventually you may build a fantastic and unique web site. The down site is you will have to do a lot of work.

LVW is a content management system but design specifically for one task. Because of this the amount of effort you will need to expend on your site will be minimal compared with a generic solution. Also you are getting free hosting and support from like minded people. The down side is you will be constrained by LVW structure compared to a totally generic CMS.

Somewhere on your site you should make it clear what type of food is acceptable at your events to stop any suprises.

No, the impact would be too great for the other site owners, but I may be able to email you the raw data which you could re-key in. Just don't make a habit of it.

No, but it helps. There's an HTML editor for those who want to it, and Word like editor for those more timid and at the very least LVW will try it best to format you pages even if you don't.

It is recommended you do learn some basic HTML as it will make your life easier in the longer term.

Also see this question.

You've failed to include some end tag in your HTML, most probably one of the DIV ones or a bad link. Check your content carefully. At the bottom of each page there is a link to an HTML validator (WC3 XHTML) – use it, if the errors are mine please let me know.

Your HTML is badly formed. Ensure you have <p%gt; and </p%gt; tags around (not in between) your paragraphs.

Copy and pasting HTML from another site is often the cause of bad HTML. Your HTML should look simple. If you find there are lots of strange tags in it (font, div, span) the chances are you will get problems.

Pasting <script%gt; tags can compromise the security of your site.

The Golden Rule is: don't paste things into LVW unless YOU understand what it does.

At the bottom of every page on your site a link "W3C XHTML 1.0" that will check that page is valid.

If you find an error in HTML directly produced by LVW then please let me know.

When text is put into LVW without HTML markup it tries its best to format the text the way it hopes it should look. Of course, it really doesn't have a clue what it should look like, so it takes hints from the way the text is laid out.

It can be confused.

It understands a paragraph as a lump of text separate by blank lines. But if there's a leading space before the first word it assumes it should not format the text.

Adding "*" to the start of the lines produces bullet lists, putting -------- under a line of text produces a header etc

Have a read ofthis if you want to know all the plain text formatting rules (this is the code library LVW uses.

Word etc will added its own HTML. Some of it is rubbish and some of it contains CSS instructions that may override your themes.

Removing the "class" and "style" attributes of the text may improve things greatly and also make your page load faster.

This Word document cleaner may help.

Any browser should be able to read a site created by LVW. But, the LVW configuration site is more demanding on browser technology.

As such only the firefox browser is actively supported. It is free and runs on all popular operating systems. It also has a wealth of development plugins which will make your life easier.

You can get it here

I recommend the following plugs if you want to fancy things with LVW:

• Background image saver
• Link Checker
• Colorzilla
• EditCSS
• ViewSourceWith
• CSSValidator
• CSSViewer
• HTML Validator

LVW is routinely tested in Opera and konqueror, but both of those browser have limitation when it comes to the RichTextEditor used by LVW.

Beware that Internet Explorer has a poor implementation of CSS and what may look great in firefox or opera may fail on it.

That's right. It's away of reducing unwanted/irrelevant enquires. Good!

Use the LVW_EMAIL tag. It can be inserted with the "Email Button" in either LVW editor. Don't put an unprotected email address on your site.

Firstly, ask as many people as possible to link to your site.

Here are some to try:

• Vegan Family
• Vegan London
• IVU
• Vegan Society
• Vegetarian Society
• Viva
• Vegan Peace
• Vegan Peace
• Vegan Village
• Vegout.info
• Yell
• www.regiochannel.co.uk
• A lot of organics
• Veggie Global
• Vegan Views Global
• Veggies Link Book
• Abolitionist-online

If you run events you may wish to use your local BBC site event calender.

Feel free to suggest other places.

Remember you are automatically linked to the other LVW sites through their link pages.

Secondly, ensure that the phrases that people are most likely to search for appear on your site. You check look at the LVW site access logs to see what the most common searches are on the sites.

If the most obvious search for you site is "Bristol vegan" then add that as part of your sites' introduction text.

Get to know your stats and use the recommended analysis tools listed on that page.

If you have a new site telling Google about i it can spend things up.

LVW centres your map based on the physical locations of all your locations. If the centre appears wrong it will be because one or more of your locations is in the wrong place. LVW uses Google Geo-Coding service to work out where to plot a location from its address - some times it gets it wrong.

To find the bad location, open up your map and keep zooming out until you spot the wayward location. Note its name and then go a check its address. You may need to manual state its latitude and longitude. See the location's configuration page for more options.

LVW protects itself from being overloaded with large images in a very crude way - if the image is too large it aborts. The image limit is about 1M, way way way above what you need. If this happens to you then simple make you image a sensible size. Most web images are about 2-30K.

Yes, create a normal size image, make it square then use to turn it into a favicon.

Use the Image button in either editor.

LVW has a unique ID for any image you load into it. The is allows you to use its ID instead of a file name in your HTML. This has the advantage that if you change the file, e.g. from a .jpg to a .png you don't have to change any IMG tag.

E.g.

First make sure you are not abusing copyrighted material. If it is a picture of someone's restaurant I would be very surprised if they would minded you using it. It is best to load images into LVW first as it will improve the reliability of your site and, normally, its speed.

Well, nearly everything! Have a look at the front page for some examples.

Try not to go over board with large images as it will slow down your site when it loads.

But, the thing that will make your site special is what your group does and the content you put on your site. If each of your location listing descriptions is a one-liner and your event listing consists of the same old venue, the same old menu, the same old people on the 1st Tuesday of every month, then there is nothing LVW could ever do increase the popularity of your site or your group. LVW is designed to free up your time to do more exciting things with your group.

You want the Gimp then from www.gimp.org. It runs on Linux/Unix, Windows and MacOSX. It is totally free, but more than that it is very very good.

Equally as good and equally free, but for SVG, is Ink Scape. LVW little information icon are created with this.

Also have a look at GIFWorks. Amough other things it can help you optimse your images.

Yes, it does, and boy is it easy to setup. Load your images into LVW and give them all the same keyword, say, "Gastonbury2005". Pull up the create gallery page and specify the keyword.

Try some of these free services

• sitereportcard
• 1-hit.com
• websiteoptimization.com
• submitexpress

The adverts will poorly match your site if you have little content or your content is poorely written. Google supplies relevant adverts if it work what your site is about.

LVW provides free web site. No one makes a profit from it. In fact, all time given to it is freely done. But as time can be given freely, physically hosting the sites costs money, a few hundred a year, and as the number of sites increase, so do the hosting costs. LVW currently runs Google Ads on most sites and this makes a contribution to the hosting costs (but not all).

Some time soonish LVW will have its own veggie only advertising service and that will allow site owners to earn from their sites, as well as LVW helping to cover it costs, but that is still being worked on.

So bare with us and the ads, and if you really have a problem with it then talk to me a we can come to some arrangement.

Please do. I'm a programmer not a graphics artist. Any practical help in this direction would be fab.

Some things, in no particular order, planned are:

• Intergrate with Google Map
• An automatic "What's new" section - Site owners will not have to do anything - LVW will work it out.
• The location listing for a town will become more detailed. So users will have a 'drilldown' effect when searching for restaurants etc. As they narrow thier search down they get more detail.
• RSS for the news
• Upload of PDF's. This will allow sites to host newsletters etc.
• Allow users to suggest new locations.
• A "report out of date information" link to appear on all locations pages. This will encourage users to report mistakes.
• Add a 'private' section to the sites. This will allow site owners to have privileged information for registered users.
• Add "distance to" on Nearby locations box.
• Intergerate with an ad server and try and generate some cash for the user sites.

And some boring things ...

• Server upgrade
• Database upgrade
• Forum upgrade
• Remove some crap code that's still hanging about in the user site. You don't see it, but I do.