Work on the our new, bespoke website (version 3.0) is still coming along nicely. Infact, things are going so well, we've started work on the next minor update (version 3.1) we hope will follow very soon. Actually, if things continue to go this well we may even skip 3.0 and make 3.1 our the first publicly available version.

As i posted few weeks ago, most of the bugs of pages not loading where they should be (ie if they do exist) have been fixed in 3.0 which has allowed us to bring the website live at the beginning of the month.

There are however some nasty bugs/annoyances in 3.0 though. The major one being bad colour matching in the blue frame. We've been unable to fix or even find the cause of this bug. What's weird is that on some systems the colours match fairly well, while on others there's an obvious colour difference. This isn't one of those browser related issues either, during testing we've seen the colour matching being different on the same browser & operating system. Thanks however to a new approach to our website design in version 3.1, this severe bug should see itself fixed.

What's new in 3.1?

• CSS Level 3
  One of the major changes in 3.1 is the introduction of the new functionality that's part of the CSS Level 3 standard.
  
  CSS is a "language" which is used to style and format today's websites. CSS Level 3 (CSS 3) is an expansion of the language (think of it as CSS version 3).
  
  Some of the CSS 3 features version 3.1 of our website will use are:
  
  • Layered backgrounds
    
  • Shadow effects
    
    
  Another thing that we'll use in version 3.1 is CSS 3s rounded corners feature, to create the same effect that's been implemented on our current version 3 website.
  
  One downside to the use of CSS 3 features is that most of them (at least all the ones we currently planning on using) are not (yet) supported by Microsoft's Windows Internet Explorer (a perfect example of why web developers don't like Internet Explorer). Don't worry though, This should change with the forthcoming release of Windows Internet Explorer 9. Don't worry though, we are putting alternatives in place so that the website looks good & works well in (current versions of) Internet Explorer.
  
  
• New navigation menu
  Our new navigation menu is fully search engine compatible, so we'll now be able to reduce some the the links on the footer of our pages
  
  
• Enhanced themes
  Version 3.0 of our website was designed with support for Themes. Not only can visitors select the Theme they wish to use, but there's also automated themes support (where themes can be automatically set based on time etc).
  
  Version 3.0 does also support themes to some extent, however this is unfortunately only extends to changing the background ("wallpaper"). Version 3.1 will offer significant improvements by allowing text formatting (colours, fonts, size etc.) and much more to be changed.
  
  
• Improved visual scalability
  Some parts of the website (most notably graphics, including the background) will include the ability to "scale" better, to better accommodate the wide variety of screen resolutions. At the moment, this only applies to the background graphic(s), the actual content area will remain a fixed size. This however can change in the future.

As you can see, some nice "tweaks" have been made already, and as has been mentioned, we hope to bring this public live in the next month or two.

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