The latest from the SBS Webteam Blog http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=43 Last Thursday we attended the BCS Oxon Web Competition prize giving at the Shrivenham Campus of Cranfield University. The event was attended by teams from schools across the county who also entered th... St. Birinus School khlo 2005-06-30 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=42 Because of the holidays, it's been a quiet two weeks, but we have made several changes: AboutWe've added an aerial photograph of Didcot which shows St. Birinus in the foreground. The picture also... St. Birinus School khlo 2005-06-09 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=41 I have just rewritten the user interface for the part of the website admin system which allows users to upload files such as images. The aims was to make it easier to use and more friendly. The old... St. Birinus School khlo 2005-06-03 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=40 We redesigned the homepage just under a month ago. Since then there has been great feedback from both members of the web team, staff and visitors. The homepage was really redesigned to address problem... St. Birinus School khlo 2005-05-26 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=39 The following pages have been updated or added in the last 7 days: Carmina BuranaDetails of the school choir's performance of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana at Dorchester Abbey. Treasure Island Audi... St. Birinus School khlo 2005-05-26 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=38 A few weeks ago we added instructions of how to access your school area from home in the new Pupils Zone. Many friends had asked for the address to access their school area and how to do it. It's now ... St. Birinus School khlo 2005-05-24 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=37 Recently, we were handed a copy of the Treasure Island production video and asked to upload it onto the website. Now, uploading two hours worth of footage onto the website for everyone to watch isn't ... St. Birinus School jbaker 2005-05-23 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=36 Over the last week, the website has seen updates including: ProspectusWe've put up a copy of this year's prospectus online. Didcot Win FA Vase FinalDetails of Didcot Town's 3-2 win against AFC S... St. Birinus School khlo 2005-05-19 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=35 Since we launched our own appeal site, in aid of the Oxford Children’s Hospital, it has really helped boost the Campaign – and, many more pupils have become aware of the massive £15m fund. There ar... St. Birinus School abaker 2005-05-16 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=34 Our OCHC site was redesigned last week. The OCHC site was one of the oldest parts of the site and the old design was suffering under problems with space usage. A new design aimed to solve some of thos... St. Birinus School khlo 2005-05-15 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=33 This week we launched the Pupils Zone. The Pupils Zone has been in progress for several weeks and has information on how to access your school area, the week's MunchBox menu, students work and a timet... St. Birinus School khlo 2005-05-12 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=32 We recently redesigned much of the site, for example by adding left hand sidebars to pages and redesigning the homepage. This was partly prompted by some usability shortfalls. Some users couldn't... St. Birinus School khlo 2005-05-07 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=31 Writing the calendar was probably one of the most interesting parts of the frontpage. Since the homepage was launched, the calendar has been through several revisions with bug fixes, additions and aes... St. Birinus School khlo 2005-05-06 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=30 Over the last week, there have been some large changes to the design and the workings of the website. We have blogged on these changes before: Site Design Changes Homepage Redesign Search En... St. Birinus School khlo 2005-05-05 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=29 We've updated the search engine again so that it provides a more comprehensive search of the site. Before, the Search Engine would just search the pages for the search term. This was all very well, b... St. Birinus School jbaker 2005-05-01 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=28 At 7:00 today we launched a brand new homepage. This has been in the pipeline for several days. Old Homepage There were several problems with the old design: We wanted to feature the Ski Tr... St. Birinus School khlo 2005-04-30 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=27 On the right hand side of the homepage you may have noticed a different background image for the contact details every time you visit it. The idea of this initially was to be able to show some of the ... St. Birinus School khlo 2005-04-29 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=26 There've been several design changes over the last day. Old Basketball Club Page New Basketball Club Page These changes have been made after listening to feedback in the forums, through the con... St. Birinus School khlo 2005-04-28 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=25 To allow users to easily keep the website update, we have written an Administration Panel to accompany the site. Members of web club and staff have their own username and password which they login wit... St. Birinus School khlo 2005-04-26 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=24 Over the last few weeks the following pages have been added: Maths Revision SitesLinks to useful websites which will help you with your maths revision. Supermarket Promotion VouchersDetails of t... St. Birinus School khlo 2005-04-24 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=23 When you read news on this website, you'll see http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/news/ in the address bar. From this URL it may appear as if there is a folder called news on the web server. In fact th... St. Birinus School khlo 2005-03-31 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=22 The following department websites have seen updates over the last week: Art DepartmentThere is now a list of staff and details on the courses and results at Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4 and A-Level. ... St. Birinus School khlo 2005-03-25 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=21 The members area of the site hasn't seen much action up until now, and it was one of the few sections of the site that we were unhappy with. And so, we decided to redesign it from the ground up with a... St. Birinus School jbaker 2005-03-24 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=20 We use a home-grown CMS written in PHP. The Content Management System sits between the web server, Apache and a mySQL database. One of the benefits of running a CMS over having static web pages is ... St. Birinus School khlo 2005-03-19 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=19 In our never ending quest for world domination, I, errr, mean helping out our users, we've created a search plugin so that you can search the school website from within your browser without th... St. Birinus School jbaker 2005-03-18 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=18 In the 5 months since the website's launch in October 2004, we've recieved over 85,000 to the website homepage - about 570 homepage hits a day. This month 155,000 files were requested - 32,577 of whic... St. Birinus School khlo 2005-02-26 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=17 As this year's musical production, Treasure Island, was approaching we felt it was time to dedicate some real estate on our front page and create a front page image for Treasure Island. The first thin... St. Birinus School khlo 2005-02-06 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=16 Over the last days we've made several changes to the search engine system which should make finding information alot easier. Spelling If a word is misspelled the search engine will suggest an al... St. Birinus School khlo 2005-01-30 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=15 Today, we spent sometime replacing our previous WYSIWYG forum editor with a new one; TinyMCE. The new editor is, like our previous one, open source, but the new one gives us more control over the con... St. Birinus School jbaker 2005-01-30 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=14 One of the pages I've really been meaning to get around to update was the School Calendar. The old page, although it worked looked cluttered and required quite a bit of scrolling to find upcoming even... St. Birinus School khlo 2005-01-27 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=13 This christmas we wanted to give the site a bit of a christmas feel. The best way to do this was to add a front page image to do with Christmas; the first image a visitor sees when visiting the websit... St. Birinus School khlo 2004-12-05 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=12 If you use Firefox, and you do web development, the Web Developer Extension is essential! The extension comes in very useful with development and has literally saved hours whilst developing this si... St. Birinus School khlo 2004-11-27 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=11 We ran the St. Birinus Website through SiteScore today, and recieved a rating of 8.9. Sitescore awarded us: Marketing - 7.2 Design - 10.0 Accessibility - 10.0 Experience - 9.9 ... St. Birinus School khlo 2004-10-27 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=10 Although we don't have high tech usability labs, we've done some basic limited usability testing. Usability is important - using a website should be easy and obvious.We've had a variety of feedback. S... St. Birinus School khlo 2004-10-12 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=9 We've recently launched a links page as part of our new Resources section. The intention of this section is to produce a one-stop shop for collecting useful websites - links useful for research, homew... St. Birinus School khlo 2004-10-08 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=8 One of the aims of the new website was to allow the website to be edited by people throughout the school, whether or not they had experience with web design. We use WYSIWYG editors to allow users to c... St. Birinus School khlo 2004-10-08 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=7 Further to the earlier post, I've written a script which allows you to backup your website's source code. This script is similar to the database backup script, in that you don't need to do anything to... St. Birinus School khlo 2004-10-05 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=6 As you may well have noticed, we've made some adjustments to the SBS website homepage. At the bottom of the page we have grouped together the information that was before just floating around down the... St. Birinus School jbaker 2004-09-29 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=5 Backing up your website regularly is important. This is less important with a static website, but when you run a dynamic website (PHP/mySQL for example), it's essential you backup regularly. Unfortun... St. Birinus School khlo 2004-09-28 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=4 Aren't we nice? Not only have we recently created a page so you can find out what's new on the site, but now you can also view that same information in the sidebar (certain browsers only)! How, you as... St. Birinus School jbaker 2004-09-26 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=3 Tired of countless popups? Fed up of having to constantly having to patch security flaws? Feel that your browser could be so much more? Want to take back the web? Well, look no further! We have the... St. Birinus School jbaker 2004-09-23 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=2 We've recently implemented a clickable logo on the St. Birinus Website. 80% of websites today have a clickable logo which will return you to the homepage. With the St. Birinus site, this was something... St. Birinus School khlo 2004-09-23 http://www.st-birinus.oxon.sch.uk/blog.sbs?id=1 It's been a ride! The server hard drive failed near the start of the summer holidays, and we've been working since to get the site back up. We've managed to restore alot of the content and most of the... St. Birinus School khlo 2004-09-23