Second Edition News for April 13, 2002

Coming very soon - the new home page

Coming soon

By Gerard Knapp

In last Friday's News we announced that Cyclingnews.com was to soon have the first major change to the home page since the site was first launched in 1995.

Well, we can't think of a more fitting occasion to introduce the new look than the same weekend as the 100th edition of Paris-Roubaix, that brutal, dangerous and epic race which is always one of the highlights of the year.

We would like to thank everyone who wrote in and provided their feedback - we value your comments immensely. Overall, the feedback was very positive, with the main comments being the number of links on the home page and the size of the type on screen, as well as the position of the main link to our popular daily News page.

Well, we have reduced the number of hyperlinks and the link to daily News is now higher up the page than where it is on the current home page.

Some people asked 'why?' Why change the home page? We genuinely believed a facelift was overdue and it is also part of the major re-organisation of Cyclingnews, which now contains well over 50,000 documents.

On every page of Cyclingnews you can now access regularly updated Index pages for the eight major categories of content in Cyclingnews, covering Road, MTB, Track, Tech, Features and so on. Each Index page aggregates all content of a similar nature into the one directory page.

The home page re-design - while only one page - comes at the end of a gradual overhaul of how our content is presented. Our comprehensive race sections have evolved into 'mini-sites' for the big races, with links to the many stories and photos we publish for each major race.

There is also a technical consideration at work here. When Cyclingnews was launched by Professor Bill Mitchell in 1995, the Web (and world for that matter) was a different place. The way that HTML was coded has changed and the new design is meant to be compliant with new specifications laid down by the W3C, kind of like the UCI for Web sites.

We realise there will be some teething problems and we've already addressed nearly every instance that has been reported. The main technical problem is the wide variety of Web browser and computer platform combinations which are now in use. A browser from Netscape will render pages quite differently to Microsoft's Internet Explorer and there are even variations among different versions of the same browser. The same PC running Netscape and Internet Explorer will generate different results, such as a 25% difference in the size of type on the screen. We have introduced specific code to address these inconsistencies, but the software developers behind new browsers are always throwing new spanners into the works and to say the design team has been making uncomplimentary remarks would be an understatement.

And for those who are interested, we can make this observation: Microsoft's Internet Explorer is far more fault tolerant than Netscape Navigator, which is a real tickler for correct code. One person commented that IE has to be fault tolerant, because it can display sites built using FrontPage, but this isn't the forum for bagging software.

Type too small?

We have received several comments that the type in the News pages is too small - this is due to the problem described above, ie, inconsistent rendering among different browser and platform combinations.

If the type is too small, there is an easy fix, and one which our new design should allow. It's simple - just increase the text size in your browser preferences. This is under the 'View' menu (see - text size), and then increase as you please.

However, if there are any problems at all, then please let us know. Send your comments to: cyclingnews@cyclingnews.com

So thanks again for all your comments, and I also want to say thank you to the companies you see advertising on Cyclingnews - without their support, we couldn't bring you the same level of results, photos and features from the world of cycling. From all reports, there is a high degree of mutual support out there, and we are delighted to feature some of the greatest names in cycling on our site.

Then of course there's the people who work on Cyclingnews - from full-time staff through to the many contributors around the world - and without them, there wouldn't be anything at all.

So on this huge weekend in cycling, we hope you enjoy the live coverage of Paris-Roubaix if you log on when the race is underway, and thanks again for visiting.