Website History
2004 Oct 1 New Time Out section
2004 May 7 New site uploaded and Contact Form fixed.
2004 April 21 Draft new site ready for comment
2004 March New design by Circle Design
2003 May 6 Improved Arial headings
2003 April 17 Email addresses withdrawn and pointed to Contact page
2003 April 14 Submitted to AllTheWeb, AltaVistaGoogle, Hotbot, Lycos, Mirago, Yahoo
DMOZ (for AOL Search, AltaVista, HotBot, Google, Lycos, Netscape Search)
Inktomi (for AOL, MSN, iWon, Looksmart etc)
2003 April 9 Font now 'Lucida Sans Unicode' and new address added
2003 March 26 Second draft uses Arial fonts
2003 March 24 First draft created
Immediate Things
Picture of the Landrover people is rather small. Do you have a larger version, perhaps 600 wide
What happened to the Dutchman?
Need pictures (particularly pictures of the consultants) - promised for November
The USP
We need something that people in the industry will click into often. I have two - the Evaluation form on Waller, and the News on Goring. The One Big Thing at the moment on Remit is the reasons for selecting IT systems.
We do not highlight the new and exciting things strongly enough
Longer Term Problems
Articles should have consistently, a heading, 3-5 line summary and lots of sub-headings. Something we did when we started but it seems to have dropped off.
We ought to have links to more other sites. Such links improve search engine placement
Need to improve search engine access
- provide text links at bottom of pages
- provide text in heading area of each page
Printing problem on narrow (colour) printers, left side gets truncated.
We could put in a Print Text option for all the pages.
But the real answer is to have the heading re-done, and that is expensive.
PDF files contract to the size of the page so this is OK
And we also have a problem with people who insist on having 640 wide displays as the heading collapses.
Contact details on the homepage (in fact every page would be better)
Would like Contact Thankyou page to show material submitted.
Contact page - if you do not enter Required items you still can send it
PDF Things
PDF files do not have navigation. So the visitors have to use BACK to climb out of them.
We have a possible search engine problem when the only text is in a PDF file.
Neither do the PDF files have an Email a Friend feature. Is this really a good idea?
Technical challenges
- CSS format is not very easy to vary for special requirements
- updating the files on the ED computer uses special software which is not compatible with the rest of the Internet world
- lack of detailed statistics - apparently could be solvable if we changed all the .html tags to .cfm - which I guess is a possibilty
- should be possible to have the CSS and top menu material as a one-off file included be a single statement in each page. It did not work when I tried it.