The times they are a-changing

New version of AudlemOnline

For the last year or more, the AudlemOnline webteam has been wanting to change the website into a revised format. We have been continually frustrated by a combination of COVID, making it impossible to meet up properly to sort out issues, plus a series of health scares for individual members of the webteam (it's a high-risk activity, apparently, running a website).

So the webteam who are all, to a man (and woman), IT ex-professionals with an instinctive aversion to releasing software without fully testing it first, have decided to "go for broke" this weekend and pick up the pieces afterwards, unless the wheels fall off the new version dramatically in the next day or two.

The detail is explained below, but the main immediate effect will be that all items currently on chatbox and buy/sell will be lost, and will need to be re-entered when the new system is running next week.

Why are we upgrading

Well, many of the concepts behind the design of websites have changed significantly over the fifteen years or so of its existence. There is now much more focus on smaller screens, ipads and mobile phones and the layout of the screens displayed on these devices can be radically different.
The website has kept up with this to a limited extent, but the underlying technology needs to be made much more flexible.
ThenMedia have been working on this for several years on the main software package which runs all their websites, and AudlemOnline is now taking its turn to be converted.

News
This always has been and will continue to be, the mainstay of AudlemOnline. This section, apart from some changes in presentation (particularly the use of pictures within the articles) is basically unchanged.

Directory
The structure of this has changed radically, hopefully making it more easily usable. Perhaps more importantly, we are spending a lot of time on the content, which has become very out of date over the years – this still requires a major effort, not least from all the businesses and other organisations whose information is displayed in the directory and for whom it is important to get the information correct. This process will take several months to complete and it is vital that our local businesses contribute to this process.
We are putting much more emphasis on the link to individual businesses' own websites, which are of course much more prolific than they used to be.

Galleries
The existing public galleries will move across to the new website. Selecting a gallery displays thumbnail photos which can be enlarged by clicking on a thumbnail to see more detail. Good quality photos can be submitted in the normal way by emailing them to editor@audlem.org

Tourism
This is a new section to gather information that was spread over various parts of the old website, in an attempt to give potential visitors an easier access to the information they require.

Chatbox
In line with recent policy changes, nicknames and pseudonyms will no longer be allowed – items submitted will need a real name and a verifiable e-mail address – contributions will be moderated as before, but in practice we do not expect to have to resort to contacting the contributor through the e-mail more than on a very small number of occasions.

Buy/sell
This will continue much as before, but the process of removing items will be made easier and there will be no concept of logins or passwords.

Features
Some of this part of the website will suffer, at least in the short term. The old puzzles features will not be there immediately (although we hope to bring them back in as soon as we can).

Weather
We have decided to remove the weather "link" from the home page. It costs us money to provide this feature, and most people nowadays have it anyway on their own phones or computers.

The changeover process

All the existing news stories will be transferred across.
The directory contains the same information, but in a greatly improved structure, and the content and accuracy of the data is being checked and revised all the time.
At changeover all the contents of the buy/sell section and the chatbox will be lost. We are sorry about this, but the task of converting them is out of all proportion to the benefits, so you will just have to put the buy/sell items back into the new system.
We will be setting up the new system over the coming weekend – the old system will continue to run but we will only be putting up critical news stories, because anything we do at this point will have to be done again on the new system.

Finally.....

Please bear with us – this is a complicated process and things may go wrong.....