Scottish Orienteering

New SOA website

Welcome to the new site.
I hope you like the new layout and functionality. My plan is for the site to evolve over time with new features added gradually and under constant review of what works and what doesn’t. If you have any particular views or thought, let me know.

I kept trying to come up with a design that was "different", but there are things that people expect to find in certain positions. If you put them somewhere else, users get confused and miss them, the search box (top right), navigation (along the top or down one side), home page link (the logo, top left) and so on. So the site may look a bit like every other site, but at least you will know where to find things.

In response to a few emails:

For design reasons (and to make the whole page visible on a standard 1024x768 monitor without scrolling) the 3 text boxes on the front page are designed to stay the same size regardless of how much content is in them. This meant that if the summary of the latest article was long it would continue below the visible window, which I didn't think mattered as it was only a taster for the full article that you could read by clicking on the title. Some people thought this was an error, so I have now added a filter on how many words get sent to the box and then it adds a "more" link at the end.

If you have your browser set to enlarge all text on all websites then you may still loose the last few words. The rest of the site expands without any problem unless you enlarge the text to enormous sizes (I suspect anyone with eyesight that bad is probably not an orienteer).

There is always a balance between accessibility and design, you don't want to spoil the look and usability for the majority, but you try and make it as accessible as possible for others.

In some cases I have removed the standard underline for hyper-links in navigation menus, as they can make text hard to read and they look messy.

Details about using this site

Navigation aids

All Titles link to the full article
Normal text links will be blue and underlined, but some navigational links may not be underlined for clarity.
All hovered links will change to orange
All links will open in the same window.
Links to a PDF document have this icon .
Links to a Word document have this icon .
Links to an Excel spreadsheet have this icon .
Acronyms, glossary and help have a broken underline, the cursor also changes to a question mark and a tool-tip opens with the definition. Example: SOA.
Title tags (these show up when you hover over a link) to explain where links go.

How to adjust the text size

The text on this web site has been designed to allow you to use browser controls to resize it to whatever size works best for you.

Firefox (Windows & Mac):: The control and the plus key together increases the font size. Control minus decreases the font size.
Internet Explorer (Windows):: Version 6: From the menu bar select View > Text Size, and choose a suitable text size.; Version 7: From the menu bar select Page > Text Size, and choose a suitable text size.
Netscape and Mozilla (Windows):: From the menu bar select View > Text Zoom, and choose a suitable text size.
Opera (Windows):: From the menu bar select View > Zoom, and choose a suitable page magnification.
Safari (Mac):: From the menu bar select View > Make Text Bigger, and increase to a suitable text size.
Internet Explorer (Mac):: From the menu bar select View > Text Size, and choose a suitable text size.
Netscape & Mozilla (Mac):: From the menu bar select View > Text Zoom, and choose a suitable text size.
Opera (Mac) users:: From the menu bar select View > Zoom, and choose a suitable page magnification.

Javascript

Javascript is used to enhance the content of this website. Some features, like GoogleMaps needs javascript to work, but everything else will degrade gracefully and still be functional.

JAVA

JAVA is required for RouteGadget, most home computers will have JAVA installed, but corporate networks may not.

Posted by Paul Frost on 15th Jun 07 Filed under: News