About this site
Web site Navigation
There is no doubting it, this is a big web site. It can be a bit daunting to navigate. I recommend everyone visit the Site Map at least once to gain an understanding of how the site is set up.
This web site was developed with a minimum of internal links, to reduce web site management. To make things easier for the visitor, note that almost all web pages have the same layout, and the same look and feel.
The Urban Exploration Org banner at the top of the page will take you back to this site.
The logo for the activity will take you to the main page for that activity.
At the bottom of every page is a standard footer. It has several noticeable navigational features:
The
Back icon uses a Java script that will ALWAYS take you back to the previous
page you visited.
The
Main icon contains a direct link to the web site's main interface page,
and even if you copy this page off-line (which is in breach of the copyright
terms) the link will still try to link to the web site.
This
icon links to the email page which contains my current email address.
This
icon will take you to a page with information about me.
You can also choose to go to the Site Map which contains links to almost every page on this web site
Site history
This site was created in 1996, and has gone through a lot of changes, redesigns and name changes since then. It has been known as the MDT site, the International Urban Exploration Site, Urban Exploration Org and is now just known as UrbanExploration.Org. The site is the work of mainly one person (Panic) with a small but valued contribution by a second New York based person. The site has had about 1400 hours of work put into it, not including actual time spent adventuring. I'm finally happy with the look, feel and layout. I like to keep a standard layout, hence the 'back' and 'main' navigation icons. I finally added a search engine to the site, to my mind this makes it a professional site at last. I tried a thumbnail gallery of images, but it just did not look the way I wanted and in my opinion, it decreased the site's look and feel.
Design philosophy
This web site has been designed to be compatible with many browsers, and to avoid the need for downloading extra browser enhancements. For this reason there is a minimum of Java script or flashy whiz bang stuff like Flash video. I know I could make the site more interactive using frames and timelines and mouseovers but these increase loading times of pages that already take a while to load.
I have tried keep the layout simple, without too much to distract people from the images and text, which form the main content of the web site. Mind you, this can be hard on such a large web site.
The text / font style originally was inspired by the Milk Crate Gang's old web site but the purple on a black background was too difficult to read. I adopted white on a black background and high contrast colors for headings and important points. The high contrast colour scheme and large letters were chosen to assist people with vision problems to read the pages.
This is a personal web site, not a professional one, so I reserve the right to use my artistic creativeness in the site's layout and construction. As a personal web site, with only one person working on it, you may find that there are a few mistakes, faults and inaccuracies. As I don't always have the time to correct these please feel free to point then out in a polite manner. I may take a long time to fix errors, as I prefer to explore first and document second. Please don't point out that my site could 'look better if.." I'm not interested in artistic criticism. To paraphrase Yoda; "When traveled the world you have, and created the web site with the wisdom and knowledge and hours of work then, and only then can you call yourself a web master." Critics are just people who don't have the talent to do something themselves but feel they can point out how to do that thing better.
Content philosophy
Because this web site is about urban adventuring, a lot of historical information about sites has simply not been included on this web site. That's not what the web site is about. Sure I know heaps about the history of many places such as abandoned buildings, old train tunnels and bunkers, but I am about the here and now adventure rather than the past. The aim of the site is to give people an armchair view of sites and advice on exploring them. Many of the sites outlined on this web site have also been given names by those that explore them, which are not relevant to their real name in many cases. This also helps conceal their real location, thus assisting to prevent vandalism.
Some of the information on this site has been modified to prevent it being used for locating or navigating Urban Exploration locations, particularly drains. Also, many of the maps are drawn from memory, they don't show every single detail. They are not intended to.
Misinformation
Because I prefer not to give out details of locations in order to prevent vandalism there is a fair bit of misinformation as to the location of places. Essentially UA City was created as a result from the local water authority asking me to remove location information of drains. For the same reason 3 of the drain maps contain deliberate inaccuracies and one drain is entirely made up. More info on the draining page about that. Similarly some of the buildings, railways and other sites featured on this web site have misinformation in their locations or place names. I call things what I choose to call them. As someone said in a news group about the location of the old rail-car "I think the web site owner is having a lend of us." Indeed I am. :) Also, please don't mistake misinformation for lack of knowledge. Sometimes I quite happily will make stuff up about the locations of places. This does not mean I know nothing about the place or have made a mistake. I have noticed several people are happy to mention this misinformation on their web sites suggesting I don't know what I am talking about, but for some reason don't bother to mention that there has always been advice that location information is not provided.
I have had people email me and say "You got the name wrong to this place, it's really called...." I know. I know what the names of these places are. But don't let that dissuade you from emailing me about them. I'm always fascinated in talking about these places and their history. I know a lot about the history of many places featured on this site, particularly the bunkers and buildings. Having taken the time to research the history of many places I can probably tell you a fair bit about them. But this is not a history web site, so I don't put detailed information about their history here. I am also a keen rail fan, and know a lot about the history of the railways I explore.
Two pages on this site had photos staged after exploring either because some originals were lost or it was too dangerous to take photos at the time. No other photos or events were staged. UA City is not a real place but the sites visited are.
When I travel I choose to travel by tram,
train or other public transport.
I use and recommend Showers!
Cast and crew choose to stay in Bed most
of the time that I can get away with it.
Spell correcting and invention of new words is performed by Merlin
the Magician!
Data backup by: Crash and Burn Data Recovery
Services
This
page is still under construction! - I
:
Some of the activities on this site are not legal in some countries and/or
states.
If you access this site from such a country or state
we suggest that you read and observe all of the safety
precautions listed here. DO NOT ENTER DRAINS
where doing so would not be legal or safe.
