Harrow & District Snooker & Billiards League

WEBSITE UPGRADE April 2014

Update July 2022. This website page, having been written in April 2014, is now largely irrelevant and certainly contains statistics which are out of date. However, it has not been removed for historical reasons.

Several weeks ago when upgrading from IE9 to IE10, it was noticed that some of the website's pages were not displaying correctly.

An investigation revealed that IE10 was adhering more strictly that its predecessors to the latest website coding standards laid down by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Fearing that subsequent releases of IE (and other browsers) may possibly result in some of the site's pages not displaying at all, the decision was made to rewrite all 140+ pages of the site to these latest standards (which involved the extensive implementation of Cascading Stylesheets and some 150 manhours of work).

Whilst carrying out this upgrade work, the opportunity was taken to implement the following additions and changes :-

• The display of a warning Cookie Banner when first logging on. For a brief period this was a requirement under a European directive but although this has now been (sensibly) relaxed it has become established practice to be included. This banner contains two links, one to a page explaining the Site's Cookie and Privacy Policy (also accessible via the main 'About Us' menu) the second to turn off the banner, indicating the user's acceptance of the site's use of cookies.

• For desktop users the introduction of static menus, requiring the user to mouse click to access successive lower levels of the menu structure.

• A widening of the menu bar primarily to make navigation easier for users of touch screen devices.

• For hand held devices users, the suppression of the menus (behind a standard menu reveal button) in order that a page's contents are displayed (rather than the menu structure occupying the whole display).

• A progressive reduction in the displayed font sizes when the screen width is narrowed.

• Wherever practical, the vertical splitting of a display, so that on a small screen, what would normally occupy the right hand half of a page will display below the corresponding left hand side. Although this is particularly relevant to small hand held devices (eg cell 'phones) it will also function on desk top devices when the screen width is reduced sufficiently.

It will be seen from the above that considerable effort has been made to ensure that the site is as compatible with hand held devices as it is with desktops. Perhaps of interest is the latest analysis which shows that of the 1989 site visits in the period 11-Mar-2014 to 10-Apr-2014, over 50% were from such hand held devices. The full analysis is as follows (courtesy of Google Analytics) :-

All the website's pages have been checked using the W3C Validator routine and have been thoroughly tested on the following platforms :-

Should a page display problem arise it is suggested in the first instance that the page be refreshed (for example Ctrl-F5 in IE). In the event that this is unsuccessful, check that an up to date browser is being used. Also, see this article. Note, for example, that versions of IE earlier than 7 are not supported.

The site's Webmaster will be pleased to receive any comments, suggestions or details of any problems encountered via the Contact Us page of the site.