Pendleside Books, 359 Wheatley Lane Road, Fence, Burnley, BB12 9QA, England. Tel. 01282 615617. In contrast to the above shop, Pendleside Books is not on the web, does not have e-mail or fax. and will only accept cheques in Sterling and drawn on a British bank! However they do have a huge stock of second-hand/antiquarian and new books on entomology and invertebrate zoology. And their catalogue is even more tempting than the NHBS e-mails, as you can carry it around with you and so are constantly reminded of all the books that you knew you always wanted, some that you really must have, and others that you never even knew about but that you now feel are indispensable!

The site is constructed and maintained by me, L. Smith. Its purpose is to provide information about bumblebees, and hopefully, encourage people to appreciate them.

I started the site in 1996, the year that I graduated from Aberdeen University. I would have liked to go on studying bumblebees, but there was no funding for a PhD, and I was reluctant to go elsewhere for family reasons.

So, in case I forgot all I had learned, and because the more I studied bumblebees the fonder of them I became, I felt I should try to pass on what little I knew. At the same time I had just learned HTML, so the Internet and a web site were the ideal solution.

In the early days all the pages were written in straight HTML, I did not have an editor. In 1997, partly to show off my prowess, and partly to keep up with web site fashion, I put the pages into frames. I had grandiose plans to have a cutting edge web site. Then I got an email from a teacher in Africa asking me why I'd changed my pages, and telling me his school had only very limited access to the Internet, and the frames were making it difficult for his pupils. Well this brought me right back down to earth. My other emails had been mainly from US schools, and none had complained about download times or access. So from that day forward I have tried to keep the pages simple. That is why the width is limited to 800 pixels, as over 30% of visitors have a monitor width of 800 pixels or less.

More recently I completed an Open University course on User Interface Design and Evaluation, and this led to me simplifying the pages even more. "If the user can't use it, it doesn't work." "If the user can't find it, it doesn't exist."

May 2006. Over 50% of you visiting this site have a monitor width of 1000 pixels or more, so I have increased the width of my pages. Also the site and it subsidiary sites have expanded, so I am currently updating the navigation and design to make browsing more intuitive. Everything I do on these pages is done for you, in the hope that you will be more appreciative of the little things that really run this world. And what a wonderful world it is.

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(C) Copyright 1997-2008