News | Webmaster blog
(18/08/2010): Today we applied our new home page. The aim was to simplify the view and provide easier access to the latest news and gallery. We would appreciate any feedback you would like to give about the change.
(01/08/2010): We have just rolled out a new page header! Although only a relatively small update it provides us with a new, cleaner look. We are also testing a new gallery search, which will be released shortly, with faster loading times and several new and improved features.
(14/03/2010): We have just finished rolling out a newly coded website. Although nothing appears to have changed on the surface many changes have taken place 'under the hood'. The website should load quicker, especially with the latest available browsers such as Google Chrome and Opera. If you notice any problems or would like to find out more details of the changes please do not hesitate to contact us.
Website improvements.
(10/06/2009): We have recently released several updates to the website that improves how the site loads in Internet Explorer 8. We have also made a number of changes, behind the scenes, to minimise the amount of time needed to make site-wide changes and taken steps to protect the website from email harvesters (spam 'bots'). Although most of these changes aren't visible we would would still be very grateful if you could contact us if you spot any errors or have any suggestions.
Internet Explorer 8 and 'Standards Mode'
(24/03/2009): First of all I would like to make all our visitors aware of the new version of Internet Explorer for your Windows computer; I would encourage all of you to upgrade to the latest version, it is now a lot better browser. Not only is it many times safer and faster but it also has greater support for web programming standards. Adhering to standards is something we strive for at Willets Scale Models and as of this week we operate in full 'Standards Mode' in the new Internet Explorer and most other browsers. If you have any questions about this change, please don't hesitate to contact me using the information on the 'Contact' page. To find out more and download Internet Explorer 8, click here.
(09/03/2009): We have just released a redesigned gallery and gallery search facility. We have redesigned our galleries slightly to allow you to make enquiries more easily and give you the ability to view a larger image of a model should you wish. We encourage you to take a look and leave feedback on the new changes and although some images may be in a different order, all of our images are still in the gallery.
(25/01/2009): Today we released our new 'favicon' (the small graphic that appears in the address bar of your browser). You may not be able to see this until your web browser 'detects' it; however if you would like to see it now, you may be able to speed up the process by deleting your browsing history (temporary files). Most of our planned website improvements are now online and we look forward to bringing further improvements in the future. Please don't hesitate to leave any feedback you may have by visiting the 'Contact' page.
(26/12/2008): We are planning a number of improvements including our news, webmaster blog and price list pages. These planned changes will hopefully make our news page more article based - featuring future special models, DCC information and guides; we hope this will also make our RSS feed more of an attractive proposition to use. Gallery and site update announcements will now be made on the home page using our new scrolling announcement bar. You should see the first of the changes within a few weeks. As ever please don't hesitate to contact us if you would like to make a comment or suggestion about our site.
21/12/2008
The homepage has been updated today with our new news ticker. We hope this will enable us to provide quicker and shorter updates to all our visitors. If you experience any problems or would like to leave any feedback please don't hesitate to contact us.
13/12/2008
We have released a new version of our contact page today, we hope you like the new layout. The enquiry link on gallery search results has also been updated to incorporate a 'close' button and to present the model you are enquiring about.
05/11/2008
Over the last 2 days significant bugs have been fixed across the whole website. These fixes include updating the gallery search to version 2 revision 5 and a URL query string issue that led to our pages becoming unusable.
18/10/2008
A few bug fixes were applied to our email form on the contact page, these applied to users of Firefox and Opera who would have seen abnormal form sizes. We are continually improving our gallery search database, we currently keep a log of all search terms that fail to bring back any results, this means should a mistake have occurred this can quickly be fixed. We encourage you to try your searches again at a later date as new models and improvements are added. We hope all our visitors like our new page footer which was applied to the website a few weeks ago; should you have any feedback about this or anything else on the website please don't hesitate to contact us.
18/09/2008
Today we released a new navigation menu; we feel this improves the look of the website whilst keeping it easy to use and quick to load. As always we greatly appreciate any feedback you may wish to leave using the contact page.
01/09/2008
Of recent there has some slight confusion about the abbreviations in our galleries, especially our gallery search. For example, a search for GWR would return no results as the abbreviation we used was GW. To solve these issues both gallery search and main galleries have been updated to use majorly known abbreviations without full stops i.e. GWR, SECR, LMS; we hope this will improve your gallery search experiences.
11/07/2008
We have redesigned our price list page with a more professional look, we hope this makes it easier to view. Over the last week we have also recreated our CSS and achieved valid status, which again improves interoperability and overall website speed.
We have made the decision to remove the AddThis links on our homepage and news pages as these buttons were little used and took time to load when visiting the website.
As ever we would love to hear our visitor's feedback on all the changes we make, this can be done using the webmaster email address at the bottom of every page or by using the 'Contact' page.
12/05/2008
As some of you may already have noticed we have updated our 'Contact' page. You can now send us mail without the need for an email client; allowing those of you without clients to contact us just as easily as those with.
04/04/2008
We have updated the footer on all the pages of the website. This new footer fixes a couple of formatting bugs in the Firefox and Opera browsers and further advertises our W3C valid compliancy; an achievement of which we are particularly proud of.
26/03/2008
Our gallery search facility has been updated. This new search improves upon the previous version by breaking bigger searches into pages. As ever we would like to hear your feedback about the website, this can be done by emailing the webmaster address at the bottom of every page.
09/03/2008
We are pleased to announce that the entire Willets Scale Models website has achieved full validation of HTML 4.01 Transitional. This means we have a fully interoperable website and strengthens our position as an openly accessible website no matter which browser, screen size or even language that you may choose to use whilst visiting. If you would like more information about what this means please don't hesitate to contact us on the webmaster email address.
29/02/2008
We have added translation buttons to the top of every page to make the website more accessible to people speaking languages other than English. This service is provided by Google. We have also fixed a small grammatical error in the date. We would like to hear your comments and suggestions about this update or any aspect of the website in general, please use the webmaster email address at the bottom of every page.
29/01/2008
Today we released a slightly redesigned version of our website. This new site should make sure that the website is viewed 'as designed' on different sized monitors and browsers. We also believe that the more central position of images in the gallery makes it easier to view. We would like to hear your feedback about the update, which can be left by using the webmaster email address at the bottom of this page or by contacting Ian Willets directly using the details above or by visiting the 'Contact' page. We hope you enjoy using the newly updated site.
03/01/2008
Today we have released quite a big site update, although not that big a difference it was certainly big to implement. Just hover over any image and you will notice the difference; alt tags have been added to almost every image. We have also settled on 'Specials' on the page for our special sale models. We hope that these updates will improve our search engine position as well as our accessibility to different browsers. As ever please don't hesitate to contact us with your feedback, it is much appreciated.
Old news: 2007
