So long 'waterscape purple'
27 May 2010
Ever since I started here in 2004 waterscape has been associated with the colour purple. The purple has been present to a greater or lesser extent in each of the three waterscape incarnations that I have known. I think it was most glaringly present in the last one; together with a squintingly bright orange and a few splashes of luminous green.
But now it has gone! And how happy we are about it. Way back in about 2005 our then Marketing Manager issued a personal plea for me to somehow oust the colour purple. Well John, better late than never!
For the last month or so we've all been squirreling away at this latest re-design (which has been more appropriately labelled a re-skinning, but I don't like the images that conjures up). Everything about the site remains the same, the navigation, the site architecture, the content, the people... we've just brought the look and feel (and colours) into the year 2010.
So that's another of my New Year Resolutions ticked off.
We hope you like it. Let us know if you have any comments, good or bad (we're braced). In fact, Odette has set up a free and funky poll just here
And now for the usual word of warning. The world of the web moves on at a frightening pace and sometimes we have to make significant decisions about whether or not we're going to keep up. The 'old' waterscape supported a screen resolution of 800 x 600 - and looked bloomin' weird to the rest of us. So now, given that only 2.4% of our audience have an 800 x 600 screen, we've made it 1024 x 768.
Likewise, our old site fully supported ie6 (which caused an awful lot of moaning amongst our developer friends let me tell you. Apparently ie is a pain and ie6 the biggest pain of all). These days, only around 9% of our audience use ie6 - compared to 40% using ie8, so we've shifted the balance. This doesn't mean that waterscape no longer works in ie6, just that it looks significantly better in everything else. It's also faster and the maps don't take 2 years to load.
Our developer Chris is going to blog about what you can do if you're using ie6 and an 800 x 600 screen but want to enjoy the full effect of our new site (or just view a map sometime before Christmas). There are no magic spells though unfortunately - unless you think of an upgrade in mythical terms.
I'm going to get myself a cup of tea.
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2 responses to this post
Natalie said...
Thanks for this Steve. We've fixed the footer links now. Re the IWA, it must be a case of great minds think alike :-)
Steve Wood said...
Huge improvement, though the front page is strangely similar to the new IWA site. Just noticed the foot links bottom right are dead. BTW thanks for fixing the RSS feeds :)