Mark IV website

We are re-publishing this article each day at present as it may be useful for those readers seeing the 'new look' for the first time.

AudlemOnline Mark IV has arrived, just less than twelve months after the original target date. However it has been achieved within budget and without recourse to enormous public bail-out or EU subsidy. And it has at least seen the light of day....

We look forward to comments on the improvements and even, where necessary, the problems and failings.

Help

One innovation which we hope will be especially useful as we switch over to the new website is a "help" feature. This is accessed through the little ? button on at the top right corner of the main part of the page. The information contained within it is by no means complete but it should assist users with the main features of the new site.

Background

As always in a highly technical environment, things change quickly. Since the last major revision of AudlemOnline in 2009, there have inevitably been many changes and advances in website design.

To get the best out of this website, you need to use a modern Internet Browser, and probably a broadband connection. In practice this means that IE7 or below will have problems doing some of the displays. Safari and Mozilla will be fine, but for best performance we recommend Google Chrome which is freely downloadable (from here).

Main changes

Apart from the obvious cosmetic and layout changes, the main areas that have been (we hope) improved are:

• The directories, and particularly the business directory, have been redesigned to make them easier to use. This recognises one of the most important functions of the website, that of helping to increase the use of local shops and businesses by making information about them more readily available.
• Social network links (facebook, twitter etc) have been introduced.
• The restructuring of the website and the development of the associated Audlem Cloud (more of this in later articles) are intended to allow easier direct use by village organisations.
• The weather link should give better and more immediate forecasts (and of course better weather) and also gives a history of the previous twenty days, and a direct link to the met office site.
• The way in which pictures are put onto the website and subsequently displayed has been made much more flexible, so that we can now use other than standard landscape pictures.
• The whole part of the site which deals with history, including documents and photos of people, has been hived off into a separate "sub-cloud" of its own. This is being worked on now but is not available yet.
• The layout of news stories has been improved and made more flexible and there is now a facility to add comments to selected individual stories.
• We now have a small but growing selection of podcasts featuring local people.
• A new method of registering users on the website will make it easier to enter chatbox, buy/sell and other user entries.

Home page

The most immediately obvious change is the new home page. The current date and weather "headline" are prominently displayed.

Direct links are provided on the home page to the main user interaction pages – "chatbox", "buy/sell", "puzzles"," interactive village map" and "contact us".

There are also direct links to the Parish Council pages, the useful links (for travel and similar information), photos (used to be galleries), podcasts and files.

As before, the right hand column will be devoted to events and latest news stories.
Then on the main body of the home page, there are links to six main sections of news and information:-

• Newsroom
• Businesses
• Services
• Events
• Groups
• Village

Navigation

Navigation round the new site will, we hope, be largely intuitive. Individual pages in the business, group and services sections are accessed via directories.

As the user progresses through the page hierarchy of the website, the trail of pages (technically known as "breadcrumbs") will appear at the top of the page, and the user can go back up the hierarchy trail by clicking on the appropriate page link.

History section

A new independent section of the site is being set up on the Audlem Cloud for historical data. This will contain the various history images and documents that were on the old website as well as the photos of scenes and people. There will be a link from the "Village" page to the history site. It is hoped to set up a new project in conjunction with the History Society so as to make available on line the archive of material held in their files.

Registered users

In line with most modern websites which allow user input, we are adopting the scheme of registered users – any user can register by entering their e-mail address, which will be automatically checked by sending a confirmation message to the e-mail address given, and this needs a reply confirmation. Once this has been done the first time, then that user is registered for chatbox entries, buy/sell entries etc and the whole process becomes much easier. The preservation of anonymity by use of nicknames is still permitted.

Comments on articles

Many articles will now contain a facility for readers to add comments (subject to moderation as for chatbox entries). Links to these comments will then be appended to the original story.

So what have we lost?

In the short term there are two functions on the existing system which will disappear.
Puzzles scoring for the sudokus requires a special bit of development on the new site which we will get round to once the new website is established and running properly. The actual puzzles still work but the element of competition has been temporarily removed.

The buy/sell list will not be transferred across to thye new site – the technical difficulty in doing this while preserving all the security of passwords and so on has proved overwhelming, so we have decided to ask buyers and sellers to enter the buy/sell items again from scratch – apologies!

The pictures of people with names attached will be part of the history "cloud" – this will hopefully start to take shape over the next month or two and ought to give a much bigger archive of historical information.

This article is from our news archive. As a result pictures or videos originally associated with it may have been removed and some of the content may no longer be accurate or relevant.