| While the website itself should not really be a news item the changes merit some explanation. |
| We have a clean new look. We have lost the old content containers and moved to a white background. Hopefully this will aid legibility, it also creates a sense of spaciousness. Design speak aside the changes are, to a certain extent, a side effect of the work we needed to do in order to make our website compliant with new, stricter standards on how web pages are made. |
This has involved remaking almost all content and the "skins" that sit on top of it all - these contain all the layout & styling elements.
We can now change our styles very quickly but more importantly the change means our site will look the same no matter what type of PC or browser you use. |
Many features such as this one (our main "article system") been updated and in some cases have new abilities. In the current case we can now mark articles as "featured", they then stay at the top of the list and get a gold border.
In development is an "article manager" that will let us flag and move articles by date.
For now 2008 articles are either in an archive category or a new page.
A great benefit of the system is that we can keep the best of the years reports which no longer have to vanish at the end of each season. |
| We have a new menu that will help search engines index our content. |
All interest areas have new home pages that are less cluttered but actually contain more content.
A major change is that events are now shown on the relevant home pages. Behind the scenes the events system has become much easier for the office to use.
In fact these are mostly unpopulated as we do not have many dates for next year yet |
Website design is an iterative process. With each revision I strive to find the best balance of style, accessibility, technical capability, ease of use, design and other demons. A key factor of this iteration has been to simplify and consolidate. |
| I am sorry it was necessary to take so many pages offline. The procedure over the last week can be likened to setting a spinnaker while another foresail is still up (using the same winches). A new website is now up without any loss of speed / key features such as events. |
I still have many smaller features and panels to make or deploy over the next few days but the basics are done.
I hope you like it. |
Regards
Ian Marlow
Website Manager
P.S. If you are still seeing some old pages simply hit the F5 key to force your browser to get the lastest versions of a page.
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| For the record we are now XHTML & CSS2.1 (Quirks mode) compliant. |