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Yes, its finally online. Day 7 of the birthday week, or as those who've been following the revision numbers would have spotted, Revision 13 of TV Whirl. Its slightly different to the big updates of past, in that this time round there aren't any new files. Instead, a whole new look comes to the site. But its more than just a few simple cosmetic changes. I've been working the past fortnight on addressing some of the longer running issues with the site, and fixing them up, to make this a more stable and enjoyable place to browse.

First off, the general site navigation has changed. Whilst I quite liked the pseudo-frames effect created using CSS, it's been causing no end of random problems since its introduction in revision 9, so at long last I've gone back to detaching the menu. I guess you'll just have to get used to scrolling back up to the top of the screen, something which should be easier as scrolling tended to go a bit funny before too.

The biggest stage of this update though has been a full audit of site content, resulting in the downloading of every single file on the site at this end (and when you consider that's over 1500 files to download, you can probably see why this update was delayed so much). This has been for two reasons . Firstly it should mean I've caught and fixed just about every lingering broken link that was on here (for those interested in stats there were only 24 of them, which isn't bad for the number of links on the site). At the same time, I've addressed something people have been critical of for a long time; the tiny overcompressed images on all the pages. Yes, the thumbnail images have all been quadrupled in size (I'm going to have to watch my bandwidth closely), so are now no longer the postage stamps they were before. The added width of these was one more reason for the ditching of a left-hand menu. I've tried to keep their quality as high as possible, but it did depend upon the source video clips I had to work with. Several pages have also been shifted around, and content such as the Birthday week stuff, and the ITV network relaunch in January have all been moved into the appropriate sections.

It's not over yet either. There are still quite a few tweaks remaining to be done design-wise. For a start, this homepage is going to be revamped somewhat soon, making it more distinctive from the other pages on the site. Design aside, I also have to start catching up on some presentation changes and adding new content to make up for no new files in this update. All of this stuff should start happening most probably around June, once the current uni work is all out of the way. Small updates and of course the Worst Ad Awards (also updated today with March's winner) will continue to be updated in the interim, so keep checking back to see what's new on the site as it moves onwards into it's 5th Year online.

~ Entei-rah

Awarded the 'Best Specialist Site' and 'Best Site for Children's TV' awards in the TellyWeb Awards 2003. I didn't do as well in 2004 mind. =;)

http://www.uktvsites.org.uk.