Derby is a City in the County of Derbyshire in England.
www.derbyphotos.co.uk is a photographic and historical record of the City and the County by local amateur photographer and website designer Andy Savage.

The vast web site you see today is the result of literally thousands of hours of work put in by myself over the years. This time includes everything from taking photographs, creating the web pages, maintaining and updating the site to answering the numerous e-mails I get.
The site concentrates on the city of Derby but has ever-expanding coverage of many Derbyshire locations, each village, Hamlet or parish is detailed with images and historical notes.

Over the years this site has evolved and grown out of control, originally just a small collection of images. It now serves many purposes, these are :
1) The promotion of the city of Derby and the County of Derbyshire.
2) As a platform to show off my photographic and website design skills.
3) As an eternal archive of Derby’s heritage. It is my intention to continue this website forever, continuously building on the collection of images and historical information.
4) As a place for ex-pats to remind them selves of Derby and Derbyshire.
5) As a catalogue of ‘stock footage’ local images for sale to businesses requiring them for magazines, books, brochures or fliers.
6) As a massive resource of historical, factual and photographic information.

There are several websites on the Internet relating to Derby and Derbyshire, all have their good and bad points, I try and make my site stand out from the rest by being different.
Key points which I stick to are :

1) Quick to view – So many website fall victim to taking an age to load in pages and photos.
My site has always been optimised for speed of loading on a dial-up modem.
Presentations which require a lot of bandwidth have their very own dedicated section on the Broadband Enhanced section of DerbyPhotos.co.uk.

2) Easy to navigate around my site. By this I mean that it should always be obvious how to get back to the main index of both the website and the sub-section of where you are currently looking. You should never get lost on my site.

3) Unique photo display method. Most websites which have photos tend to show their photos as a jpeg image on its own up in the top/left of a window and you have to click the browser back button to get back to the thumbnails. On my site all images display a separate new window which can be closed simply by clicking anywhere on the image. There is no need to use the browser controls.
This makes for very fast and convenient viewing of the photos, which has a natural feel to it.

4) Free of pop-up advert windows. There is nothing more annoying that persistent advert windows opening up at random intervals. My site does not have these. Please note: Sections which are out of my control such as the Message board, Search Page and the Jigsaw page may have adverts.
some of my pages feature adverts by google, these help pay for my hosting charges.

5) I go out of my way to keep all of my information up to date. If pubs change name or buildings are demolished then I update my pages to reflect this. If you spot anything wrong on any page, simply get in touch and I will update it.

6) Everything is on one single website, there is no need to visit multiple sites to get different information. Both the County and the City are covered on the same domain.

7) Beyond normal photography, Aside from traditional photos this site also has a wide variety of other types of image. Including night time/long exposure, panoramic, 360 degree and Interactive virtual photos. Add to this ‘then and now’ fading photos.

8) To be search engine friendly, 90% of visitors to my site arrive by Internet search engine results. My pages are designed and continuously enhanced to make sure they are seen by all the popular search engines through out the world.

9) Free links to local sites. I am more than happy to link to any local websites, to help promote them. I do not charge for this so get in touch.

10) Keeping up with technology – As computers and Internet technology evolve so does my site. Advances in connection speed, graphic capability and processor speed allow me to push the boundaries further with new features on my site such as Broadband Enhanced and Virtual Tours.

11) Appealing to whole age range. – I design my pages in such a way that that there should be something for every age range. I cater for everyone, so if its information on a nightclub you are after or old photos of how Derby used to be then you will find it all here.

I would like to make it clear that my website is completely independent and not connected, affiliated or associated in any way what so ever with any other local web sites.

I do not receive any financial funding of any kind from any local bodies or organisations, not one single penny!
I am an amateur photographer not a professional photographer.
This site is run entirely in my own spare time, my day job is completely unconnected with photography and website design.
I am a self-taught website designer with nine years design experience.
I do not work for the Derby Heritage Centre.
I do not work for Derbyshire Life Magazine.
I do not work for Derby or Derbyshire Council.

I do not know anything about tracing family trees or genealogy.
I do not have access to old photos other that the ones you can see in my old photos section.