Castle Cary Rugby Football Club

Changes to website

5 Mar 2010

A few alterations

Regular visitors to the site will have noticed a few changes to various pages over the last few weeks. This update is to let you know what's happened and why. (Apologies if this gets a tad technical but I'll try to keep it in layman's terms.)

Since the CCRFC website was launched in 2004, the growing number of pages (especially match reports — now around 200) had led to the site's underlying file structure becoming unwieldy. All the pages had rested in a single folder on the server, which meant locating and modifying them was an increasingly cumbersome task.

This has now been rectified: most sections now reside in dedicated folders and pages have been renamed with contextual date formatting, which makes site maintenance that bit easier. Outwardly, users should notice no difference in navigating but may have to refresh certain pages for the links to work.

Regarding the site's appearance, well that too has been undergoing a gradual overhaul. When I designed it six years ago, the CCRFC website represented only my second attempt at constructing one. Consequently there were many problems with the underlying HTML code. I had been far too reliant on tables for layout when I should have used CSS — Cascading Style Sheets: a single set of instructions that governs the site's overall appearance, rather than repeating them on each page. Over the years I have integrated CSS a lot more, which should mean that pages load faster and it's less daunting to make wholesale design changes.

Rather than throw everything out and start over, I've kept the same basic design. However, I wanted to reduce the prevalence of red and black slightly and introduce a different colour scheme for certain sections. I started by rationalising the current match reports, so that now a single page will suffice for the whole season and will slot into the archive when the season is complete. This has been carried over to the Results/Fixtures page, where each team has its own box: grey for the 1st XV, yellow for the 2nd XV and green for the Development Squad. The third column is collapsible: it should move below the second box for smaller screen resolutions.

The News section has also been streamlined. Two coloured boxes, each with a single graphic, now represent the most recent stories while older ones are listed underneath. The content here has been drastically reduced, with the removal of out-of-date 'time-sensitive' bulletins. However, anything that is notable in a historical context for the Club has been/will be kept.

The front page includes the most obvious improvements. A 'Forthcoming' box has been added to the left column. This will give details of upcoming matches, as well as links to Google Maps for directions to away Development Squad games. A Google Custom Search box is now featured: it expands and closes as needed. Please note that it will take a short while for Google to 'crawl' the new site structure but it should be working at 100% over the next few weeks. There are also links to social networking sites and CCRFC's YouTube channel. In addition, links to the Club's two Facebook groups can now be found on the Social homepage. Finally, a logo icon should appear on your browser's address or links bar if you add the site to your Favourites.

Elsewhere, the Galleries have been given a lick of paint with proper headers and subheaders to match the site's overall look. Here is where Internet Explorer (or IE) users lose out. IE is no longer the dominant browser that it was: relative newcomers, such as Firefox, Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome have been steadily eroding Microsoft's market share. IE now accounts for around 60% of browser usage. The problem with it for web developers is that it never renders pages exactly as you design them: there's always some flaw that has to be accounted for or lived with. For example, on this site, anyone who uses IE will see neither the drop shadow behind any of the header texts nor font smoothing — elements that are visible in other browsers. (EDIT: you can enable font smoothing in Windows, which helps a little and does eliminate the 'jagged edges' on italicised text in the Firefox for Windows browser.)

Microsoft has recently agreed to inform Windows users that there is a choice of browsers available. I may be biased because I use Mac computers and therefore the Safari browser, which of course displays this site to its best advantage! However, in the interests of neutrality, to the right are links to free downloads for the major alternatives to Internet Explorer, if anyone wants to give them a test drive.

As ever, if anyone has any questions or problems with the site, please let me know and I'll do my best to help. In the meantime, I'll continue to make the odd tweak in order to try and keep things running smoothly.

by Chris White

---

Update

14 Mar 2010

Following a period of testing in all major browsers, I have decided to embark on a gradual site rebuild, using pure CSS for layout on all pages and keeping tables only for their intended use. Visitors should hopefully notice that as a result, in addition to a few cosmetic changes, pages will load very quickly. As ever, Internet Explorer needs a careful eye and I'm only testing the site in IE8. If any IE7 users notice any problems with the display of pages — and refreshing them doesn't help — please let me know so I can rectify.

EDIT: if anyone is still using IE6 and the pages fall apart, then please upgrade to IE8 (it's free). Apologies, but IE6 is now so outmoded and used by such a small minority of visitors that (from a design perspective) it's not worth the hassle that goes with it.

Click an icon
to find out more