#justsaying

http://www.flickr.com/photos/23634513@N05/sets/72157620307427009/ 

Wednesday 27th May 2009 and on a balmy Roman night Sir Alex Furguson becomes the first manager ever to watch his team successfully defend their Champions League title. His jubilant team are eager to receive the trophy and amongst them are the three goal scorers; Rooney, Ronaldo and Vidic.

The Barcelona players are distraught having played their part in one of the most gripping finals ever. Their fans are in tears.

………………………………………………………………………………….

Unfortunately I don’t have a ticket for Rome so instead I’m off to Figueres to watch the match.

Why Figueres? Well, El Cafetó (by the Plaça de l’Ajuntament on the way to the Dalí Museum) have organised a Jumbotronic live transmission of the match right outside their cafe and Different2, supporters of this website, are sponsoring the event.

A plaza, a giant screen, emotional fans. Perfect!

You may know that we have had water restrictions here for a while – we can’t use hose pipes or fill swimming pools – but things are starting to look up.

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve had quite a bit of rain and so the reservoirs are starting to fill up a bit. Not a lot, but enough to make the introduction of  real water restrictions (e.g. no water at all during certain times of the day) become an unlikely possibility. Last week in fact the restrictions were lifted but quickly reinstated after it was realised that the water levels were still too low. However, a few more days of heavy rain might just be enough to lift the restrictions for the summer and take us into the winter without worrying too much about consumption or fines.

So like I said: Rain, rain, beautiful rain!

“Hang on a minute, what’s that I said about fines?” I can hear you asking. Well I saw a leaflet that explained all about the water shortage, the restrictions and also mentioned something about fines if a household went over a certain usage level. The leaflet was multilingual but unfortunately it was a friend’s copy and I don’t have it to hand.

Where did my friend get it from? The Tourist Information Office! What’s that about? Why can you only get information about the shortage from the tourist board? Why isn’t this information being provided with our water bills?

Those of you who have visited Empuriabrava Online before Tuesday will have noticed that the site has undergone a major redesign, one which you hopefully like. I just thought that I’d briefly explain why I redesigned the site and things to expect in the future because I haven’t quite finished doing everything that I want to do.

Improved Navigation

The main reason behind the redesign was to improve the navigation of the website. I’ve added so many things over the past couple of years that even I was having difficulty finding what I wanted! With that in mind I set about reorganising the site so that there is a constant navigation style on every page and that all of the pages are grouped into main categories. Hopefully it is now easier to get the content that you want.

Improved Layout

The previous design felt a bit cramped. When I first created the site the thinking at the time was that everything should be “above the fold” which in web design terms meant that the user shouldn’t have to scroll too much down the page. Now we know that this doesn’t matter; that if the user wants to find the information they are happy to use the scroll button. This means that designers are now able to spread the pages out; use larger fonts and line heights where appropriate, add more images and give the content room to breath as it were. Hopefully I have achieved this with the new design.

Photos

The photo gallery used to be a set of smaller images that linked to the large photo. Now you will see that each image opens a main image window that itself allows you to view the next/previous image without having to constantly return to the photo gallery page. This use of the Lightbox javascript library has added an extra functionality to the gallery.

Advertising

The redesign has allowed more space to be used for advertising and so you will see a few more Google Ads on the page. Empuriabrava Online is a labour of love, a hobby if you like and I have to find some way to cover the costs of web hosting, domain name renewals, my time and the like.

Things to Do

As I said, the site isn’t completely finished although everything on the old site is already in the the new design but there are one or two things left to do:

1. Add a “Things to Do in Empuriabrava” section and fill it with ideas and articles such as a page on boat hire, skydiving, cycling etc.
2. Expand the bars and restaurants pages to include detailed information on places that I or readers recommend. For example, a restaurant would have a photo, address, type of cuisine, average price etc.
3. Make the main parts of the website availalbe in other languages. I’m going to start with French partly because there are thousands of French visitors to the town but mainly because my wife speaks French and can translate for me!
4. Change the look of the blog and forum to reflect the new redesign and add new sections to the forum (thanks Paloma for the suggestion).

That should keep me occupied for the next couple of months!

I would really appreciate your feedback about the new redesign and your suggestions about what other things you would like to see on the site. Please feel free to leave a comment on this post or pop over to the Website Redesign thread on the forums.

Thanks.

Tomorrow I’ll be writing a proper post about the redesign, the reasons behind it and a “to do” list but if you want to let me know what you think of it so far please add a comment below. I would also REALLY like to hear if you have found any errors or problems.

Thanks

Again, thanks.

Normally in Empuriabrava most of the supermarkets are open on fiesta days but this is not the case on May Day so make sure you’re not caught out.

Have a good holiday, the weather isn’t supposed to be too bad.

I personally loved the chickens!

I have a new camera and I’m not too sure how to use it properly so some of the pictures leave a lot to be desired. Still, practice makes perfect.

See the photos for yourself on Flickr. 

More details to follow…