Second Edition News for April 14, 2002

Cyclingnews' Live coverage of the 100th Paris-Roubaix has commenced. Coverage started at 10:40 local Europe time (4:40am USA eastern time, 1:40am USA west, 6:40pm Australian east).

It's here - the new home page

The way we were

By Gerard Knapp

Following on from yesterday's third announcement of the impending introduction of our new home page, today - and as the peloton bounced into the 21st sector of pavé on the parcours of Paris-Roubaix - we went live with the new home page.

Once again, we'd like to thank everyone who wrote in with their comments - many positive, some were critical. But the most important thing to remember is that the content will not change. It is still the same group of people producing Cyclingnews, so you can be certain that the real reason you visit the site - for the stories, photos, results and features - will not be changing.

So just to recap, 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.

With the new home page, many people have commented about the position of the four main categories of content - such as Tech, Major Races, Features and News. The reasons for placing the content in their respective positions is to do with the number of links in each category - if we were to place Major Races above Tech, then Tech would clearly be buried well down the page. There are so many races covered on Cyclingnews that we cannot avoid it being a large slab of links. If anything, the new design actually places the links for the daily News and the Major Races higher up the page.

One of the great things about the Internet is that it can change so quickly; nothing is set in concrete, like this new home page, although the previous home page had not changed at all for a few years.

Therefore, we will listen and learn from your comments.

New navigation

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.

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.

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

We hope you enjoy the live coverage of Paris-Roubaix if you have logged on when the race is underway, and thanks again for visiting.