E & H Baxendale Ltd are designers and manufacturers of trussed rafters and easi-joist® the metal web joist system from Wolf Systems Ltd.
Kensington Developments at Lytham Quays have ordered another attic garage for their Villa development bringing the total of garages they have ordered to four.
Well I have started working on a theme based upon the rest of the eandhbaxendale.com site, and so far it’s going well. I have got the header, sidebar and content area working somewhat, I just have to sort out the styles and the footer section, and then I will take it for a test drive to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything, which I probably have.
Looking at those two sentences it sounds so simple, but it is my first time working on a WordPress theme and my first time working with PHP, the enquiry forms on the main site are submitted using PHP but that is a script I downloaded and the only customising I did was to add the email address the forms are submitted to.
Well it’s that time of year again, I am another year older, 25 today, and the domain eandhbaxendale.com is 1, it’s hard to believe that I only set the domain up a year ago.
The website itself is more like five years old, it first started out as my second year project for my HND in Computing, before that all we had was one page with our address and phone number, baxtruss.co.uk, I think it was hosted by freeserve, then around 2002/3 I got involved and had broadband installed so the website moved to plus.net keeping the baxtruss.co.uk domain.
Then three or four years later plus.net’s service was getting terrible, we were losing the connection all the time, so over to BT Business Broadband we switched the website now hosted on their servers which aren’t the best, so over to fasthosts I went and set up eandhbaxendale.com and ever since the website has continued to improve and the number of enquiries gained through the website has also grown.
So now for the next twelve months, well with construction industry and the economy in general slowing right down business is tough, the aim of the game at the moment is to batten the hatches and survive the storm, hopefully the website can help with that by bringing in business not just from our local area but further afield as well. I am planning on improving the current online enquiry system and possibly bringing back the old truss type enquiry forms as well, so that should help. I have also been working on adding new content to the site and improving the existing content which will hopefully make it make it more appealing to the search engines which intern should make it easier to find us when using the search engines.
Talking about search engines, Google and Yahoo are great, I don’t have a problem with them, they have indexed most of the site, MSN Live search on the overhand, well that is definately not playing nice, for some reason most of the site has disappeared from the Live index and the URLs that remain are old and no longer exist. I know i changed some of the urls a few months ago but I set up 301 redirects, Google and Yahoo followed them and updated their indexes accordingly but not Live it just isn’t playing ball, I have been using Webmaster tools since I set up the domain and submitted sitemaps whenever I updated the site but No it just won’t have it, I am at a loss, I just don’t know what to do.
Yesterday we completed manufacturing the easi-joist floor for the 9th Villa at Kensington Developments Lytham Quays development, each floor package contains a total of 126 joists ranging in span from around 1.5m to 6m giving a total of 601.1m of joists.
To date we have manufactured a total of 5409.9m of easi-joist for the Lytham Quays site or to put it another way we have manufactured enough easi-joist to cover just over 3 miles if laid end to end.
If you would like to find out more about the Villa Collection at Lytham Quays or view an interactive 3D model (PDF) of the floor or find out more about easi-joist why not visit our main website.
Welcome to WordPress. After waying up all the pros and cons I decided to install WordPress on our server and use that for blogging rather than Blogware, over the coming months I am hoping to setup a custom template that will give the blog a simialr appearance to the rest of eandhbaxendale.com
With all the changes I have made to the code over recent weeks, one thing I had forgot about was keeping the code valid, until that is Tony the managing director was having a look at the site and clicked on the valid xhtml button at the bottom of one of the pages and it failed. So after 10 minutes testing each page and making a few small changes to the code the site is once again xhtml 1.0 valid, it seems that as I was removing old code I left the odd tag behind which didn't affect the site in the latest browsers but could have caused a few problems with older browsers.
Today I have added jquery to the site, the old lightboxes that were used to view photos on the about us page, easi-joist pages, and the mccarthy and stone page have been updated with a new jquery powered lightbox that is visually identical to the old lightbox but the code behind it is smaller and much more efficient.
I have also implemented a new way of viewing the pdf files that are available to view and download on the site, I have added a jquery powered iFrame (see below) that is built in a similar way to the jquery thickbox, this viewer enables you to view the PDF files without opening a new window unless that is you don’t have adobe reader set to view pdfs in your Internet browser in which case the iFrame will appear followed by Adobe Reader.
The new iFrame viewer is currently available on the downloads page and on the Trussed Rafter Roof Shapes page.
I have updated the custom error pages for the site so they are a little bit smarter, if you navigate to the error pages manually a message is automatically displayed informing you that you shouldn't be there because and error hasn't occurred. If you do encounter an error the page then displays an error message informing you what type of error it is and that a message has automatically been sent to the webmaster (me) informing me of what link, if any caused the error. The error message also provides some solutions to possible errors and has the google advanced error pages box which also provides possible solutions to 404 page not found errors by providing you with a list of the pages that closest match the page you tried to access.
Yesterday I started re-coding the navigation panel on the left side of the site, it used to be table based, then it was paragraph based. and now well it's list based, like the majority of navigation panels on the web today. As well as making that switch from paragraphs to lists I have also re-coded the styles to make them more efficent and to add a dynamic highlighting effect, the highlight effect changes the navigation panels background of the page that is currently open, previousley this had to be coded onto each page which made the code for the navigation panel bigger than it needed to be. Anyway I have now made the change sitewide.
Something I am planning on doing sometime in the coming weeks is to re-write the style sheets and seperate them, one for layout, one for the side panel, one for the main content area, one for enquiry forms, and one for tables. I do have someting similar at the moment but the styles are all over and not easy to find.
Today two roof trussed rafter packages were delivered, the easi-joist floor packages were delivered back in April, we have also begun manufacturing a further easi-joist floor package bringing the total of villa’s in progress to nine. To find out more about the Villa Collection at Kensington Developments Lytham Quays site why not visit the Kensington page in our Portfolio section.
