Enquiry forms and IE9

5th Jan 2011 Posted by Richard in Website News

Late last year it came to my attention that there was an issue with the Internet Explorer 9 beta version which was preventing some of the enquiry forms from being submitted by telling the user that they had failed to complete a required field when the form was validated. Unfortunately the scripts that validate the form are a number of years old now and won’t be getting updated so I am in the process of testing out the jquery validation scripts and so far so good, once I am happy that the test form works I will begin the process of upgrading the existing forms to work with the new scripts. In the mean time I would advise against using IE9 beta when trying to place an enquiry.

Update 6/1/2011:
I am now happy enough with the new form validation to start rolling it out, the first to get the upgrade is the Place an Order form which is used to convert an existing enquiry into an order. The only minor issue that I have to sort out is the title tags for each of the text boxes, which are showing “<b>” and “</b>” which is the piece of code that makes text bold, the problem is those title tags double up as the validation error message so they need those tags, no doubt I will find a solution at some point.

Update 8/1/2011:
I have now upgraded the General Enquiry form with the new jquery validation, the old form was split across three accordion panels, the new form is split across two tabbed panels instead, the first tab is the enquiry form that asks for your name, contact details, and your message to the design team, with the second tab containing the file upload facility. With the old form you were limited to uploading three files, since we have now moved to new web and emails hosts our maximum combined file attachment size has increased from 10MB to 25MB, so I have added two more file attachment fields bringing the total to five. The file upload facility is something I have decided to look into further, specifically making the process a bit more user friendly, currently the user doesn’t really know what is going on until they are redirect to the successful enquiry page, it’s not really an issue if the attachments are only small but once you get to a few MB’s it can feel like a long time during which not much seems to happen, hopefully I will be able to find away of bringing some sort of progress indicator into the system.

Update 9/1/2011:
I have now upgraded the Trussed Rafter Enquiry Form with the new jquery validation and the tabbed panel layout as seen on the other recently updated forms. The only thing I still have left to do on this form is reinstate the feet and inches to millimetres calculator that was found in the sidebar of the old form.

Website Theme Update Part 2

2nd Aug 2010 Posted by Richard in Website News

Continuing on with the website theme update, I have recently updated the page header, footers and have made a few changes to the sidebars, such as including links to twitter, facebook, flickr, and our rss feed, the next stage of the update is mainly focused on the blog.

As you can see from this image thumbnail this latest update will bring the styles used for the look of the blog posts more in-line with those used in the new header. Sticky posts will also get a face-lift, currently the only thing that differentiates a sticky post from a normal post is the background colour, with the new styles sticky posts will display a padlock on the right-hand side of the post title.

I hope to activate this new theme over the next few days, assuming it doesn’t negatively affect any other elements on the site, such as page headings etc.

UPDATE: The new posts theme has now been activated, the only negative affect it has had on the rest of the site is that it has added a small margin around the content on some of the ‘normal’ pages throughout the site, this isn’t going to be a big problem, especially since I still have to tackle the new theme for the pages anyway.

Website Theme Update

9th Jul 2010 Posted by Richard in Website News

After reviewing the websites analytics data, specifically the bit about which browsers people are using to view the site, I have noticed that people are starting to visit the site using their mobile phones which the site isn’t really designed for, so over the past two weeks I have started working on a new theme for the website. The first phase is a new header, I have decided to remove the current large flash header which doesn’t work with every browser and replace it with an Ajax based rotator. At the same time I have moved the navigation and search features up into the header as well.

Also included in the new header are our phone and fax numbers as well as our email address, the phone number has been setup so if viewed on a mobile phone clicking on the phone number will activate the phones dialing app, the email address is also an email link. The main reason for adding these to the header is to make it easier for people to find our contact details, currently they can only be found on the contact us page.

Click on the image thumbnail above to open a full size image of the new themes header.

Metalwork pages updated

23rd Aug 2009 Posted by Richard in Website News

Following on from a previous post in which i mentioned that Cullen Building Products had released their 2009/2010 timber engineering connectors brochure, i have now completed updating the website with the new products.

Cullens trussed rafter connectors can be found on the trussed rafter metalwork page and their open web joist connectors can be found on the easi-joist metalwork page.

Website Update

31st Jul 2009 Posted by Richard in Website News

Today I modified the navigation panel slightly by renaming the ‘Roofing’ section ‘Trussed Rafters’ and the ‘Flooring’ section ‘easi-joist’, I also moved … As I wrote this post I was distracted by a smell of burning and the hallway filling with smoke, it seems my idiot brother put something under the grill and then decided to leave it unattended, disaster averted now back to the topic at hand.

… As I was saying I have also moved the easi-joist Roofing page out of the now ‘Trussed Rafter’ section and into the now ‘easi-joist’ section, I have also updated the breadcrumbs at the top of each page. I am planning on starting work on a new page for the easi-joist attic truss, I don’t know which section I will put it in yet because it is both a trussed rafter and an easi-joist, I could always put it in both sections I suppose. One option would be to put it in the trussed rafter section and then create a link to it from the easi-joist roofing page where some information about the easi-joist attic truss already exists.