Electronic News

As touched on in the Museum update, Michael, our Webbo, has been busy.

The new Home page link

The new shape to the web site, for those who haven't tried it yet, creates direct links from the www.wandle.org page to the most popular elements of our site - including the latest newsletter and the Museum itself. It uses a new, unique, watermark, made up from the watermill image that appears on the front of this newsletter.

Clicking on the Vestry Hall link, takes you to a graphic layout of the museum, with a picture of each display used as an icon. Click any icon, and you get a page which shows the enlarged image of the display in question, and, to the left, all the text from that display. Above the text is a simplified layout icon which enables the visitor to go immediately to another display without retuning to the main page.

The image here is of the Lavender display, and its accompanying text.

The Lavender page link

Webbo has taken the opportunity to audit the site for accessibility. There are a number of conventions now more or less accepted as the way to present sites which are accessible to the disabled. Our site scores very well anyway, but we have enhanced this by running a ‘text only' version of the displays. This is not strictly text only, but an index of the displays, which gives the visitor the ability to select just the image, just the text, or both - click on ‘an index' at the top of the main displays page to go there. The icons here are simple graphics, some drawn from the older work done by our predecessor at the Museum, some newly created.

The new Index link

By chance, we have also found we had acquired the www.wandle.info domain name, but forgotten it!. We are looking for ideas as to how to exploit this for the Wandle community at large, but it currently houses only the same version of the our home page.

Webbo has also acquired www.webbo.info on which he has placed links to all the sites he has had a hand in creating or maintaining, as well as images of Hugh, the bantam cockerel, whose existence astonishes many.

With the website growing, the job of proof reading it, and checking for mistakes, becomes ever more difficult. If you do see anything that needs correcting while visiting us at www.wandle.org please let us know. You can use email at curator@wandle.org or the feedback pages on the site, or even write to us at The Vestry Hall Annexe, London Road, Mitcham, Surrey CR4 3UD

Nicholas Hart