The observant of you may have noticed that the website is looking a little different today. Not massively but sufficently, it’s like a fresh lick of paint really though there are a few more changes when you scratch the surface. As such, I’m going to discuss the thinking about the makeover and go through what has been changed.
The website has gone through some quite major changes since it was first launched in 2006. It began life in the summer of that year when the society was just starting and months before it was finally ratified by the union. To date however these have all been to the content of the site, we’ve added a lot, created the members area and made it far more interactive. The design has remained constant though while in the outside world, technology moved on.
The first change then is that the site is now quite a bit wider when it used to be. The original site was designed to fit in an 800×600 screen because that was fairly common back then and people may be starting to look at it on portable devices. These days people have much bigger monitors and we don’t need to worry about people using phones or handhelds because the site has an alternative version for them (just open it in your phone and you’ll see the site looks different) so the site is now designed to fit in a 1024×768 screen.
It is a bit more graphics heavy now as well. Almost everyone is on broadband these days so we can make the site look a little prettier without affecting load times too much. After all, when it comes down to it, we’re all about style in A-Soc 
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Next, the site navigation has been played around with. The tab system at the top is the same but we the links themselves have changed. Each page in the site is now sectioned into one of these days and when you go into that section a submenu appears down the right. This is because as the site content expanded we needed a better way to navigate round without having just a list of pages down the right hand side as we used to have.
The final big change is that our upcoming events are now listed down the right hand side. We wanted to make it easier to find the information you were looking for when you arrived on the site and finding out what events we have on has to be high on that list so you can now see all the events we are running for the next seven days in the menu box.
There are a few other changes too. For example, with the events archive you can now browse by academic year rather than just a big long list of all previous events. The photo galleries are also paged too both in the list of albums and when there are lots of photos in one album.
All this should hopefully make the site easier to use and navigate and make it easier and faster to find the information you want. I’ll love to hear your feedback on the site so if you have any thoughts then please drop me an email and let me know what you think.