We have designed a new look to the website not because we wanted to change the old one. We liked the old look as did many of you but there were a few technical problems with it that needed addressing.
- The original menu set up was not capable of carrying the number of pages that this website has without it overflowing down the screen and dominating the left hand menu column. As a consequence we had to implement a modular ('bolt on') drop down style menu. However, this had issues with some browsers IE6, IE7 and IE8 to name but three. That said firefox Opera and Safari were okay with it. With the larger number of visitors using one of the Internet Explorer variants we needed to address the problem. This, we believe has been done with the integrated drop down menu in the new site.
- While the majority of browsers were able to display the rest of the site accurately some mobile platforms could not. With more and more visitors using mobile internet it was vital that this site was rendered correctly no matter what platform it is viewed on. The new one does this as far as we know.
Okay, We realise that the 'look' maybe is a little more clinical than the old one but these are purely cosmetic differences and are being slowly addressed by tailoring some of the graphics. The Red/Black/Red background stripe has returned and we've put the red boar logo on the module corners, although these need a little improvement. When tim permits we will tidy this up but the important thing is to get the site functioning properly then we can deal with the pretties later.
If you have any comments to make please feel free to contact us and if you still don't like the new look I'm sure you'll grow to like it eventually. After all, it's the same site, same content it just looks a little different.
