Appearance

The first thing to hit you on opening the site will be the appearance.  A lot of water has flowed under Cutthroat Bridge since Tony Morris launched the current website, and technology now allows more flexibility more easily.  So you’ll see more colour, more photos, more maps and more variety in layout.  I hope this will make it more attractive and perhaps tempt you to explore areas you haven’t visited for a while, as well as, crucially, encouraging casual visitors to stay for longer and decide to join the SBSG.

Revised Home

The new Homepage has more of a ‘newspaper‘ feel to it, carrying outlines of stories and announcements with links to more detail.  It also sports a weather application which allows you to see the current weather for Sheffield, as well as providing links to detailed hour-by-hour forecasts and longer-range views.  Navigation is now all sited on the left-hand pane, and is constant on every page on the site, so you always know how to get to your destination easily.

Content

The current site has a great deal of good material on it, and much has been updated where necessary and retained.  However, after much discussion we decided to limit the content to bird-related material, at least for the time being, so you won’t find coverage of other aspects of wildlife.

There is also new material, the most substantial of which is the compilation of , so far, 13 Site Guides for our most worthwhile sites, each with location maps and interactive maps showing the details, facilities etc of the site. These are Google maps, so satellite imagery can also be seen, which gives a much clearer picture of the habitats and land use than OS maps.   Much of the text is edited/rewritten versions of the series of guides which were published in the Bulletin many years ago (many thanks for your efforts guys) while map creation and guide formatting have helped me to while away many dark afternoons and evenings!  Each guide also has links to a powerful new ‘Records by Site’ function, which shows local records of interest from the site and any nearby ‘satellite’ sites.

There is also a Photo Gallery, which will display the cream of the growing number of digital photos being taken by members.  Details of criteria and how to submit will be found on the Gallery page.

Sightings

And now to the most popular part of the site – Recent News.  You’ll find the Recent News page looks quite familiar, the only difference being that photos will appear on clicking a ‘camera’ icon next to a record, rather than being inserted within the text.  The major difference is in the way they get there: instead of sending in emails detailing your records, you will submit them online to a new web database, where they will be checked and downloaded into the main database, and interesting records will be tagged for display on Recent News.  Details of how this works are of course on the new site.

Why the change?  Two reasons: to improve accuracy by eliminating most mistypings of species, locations, map refs etc, and because the volume of records now being submitted has grown so substantially.   This is brilliant for our precious database, but not so brilliant for the poor volunteers who administer it!  So we hope it will allow long-term continuation of this function.

SO – I’ll get back to the task of preparing for the launch, and will look forward to constructive feedback from you in due course.  I’ll make one guarantee about the site: there will still be bugs that I’ve missed!