Gary King wrote:

If WA has a way to convert this site easily to a responsive one I think it would be worthwhile. To be viewable on phones and small tablets would make the experience closer to the paper newsletter. 

What I mean is, presently this non responsive site needs a computer to view it, and computers are a sit forward - at the desk viewing experience, as opposed to TV, which is a "sit back" experience. More relaxing. Viewing on a phone or tablet is comparable to a "sit back" experience, (and I happen to know people who only use the internet on their phone -they are out there..). 

Something to consider. ;)

I often visit the website via my mobile phone and find that it loads quickly and I can navigate the site quite easily. Of course on a 4 inch screen the experience has it's limitations. But I guess the success of using the site via a mobile phone depends on a number of factors such as quality of mobile connection and processor speed of the phone.  

This is in the wake of news yesterday that mobile phone usage has apparently doubled since 2012 with the widespread adoption of 'smart' phones and the uses we can put them to. Sometimes we even make phone calls on them!

If WA has a way to convert this site easily to a responsive one I think it would be worthwhile. To be viewable on phones and small tablets would make the experience closer to the paper newsletter. 

What I mean is, presently this non responsive site needs a computer to view it, and computers are a sit forward - at the desk viewing experience, as opposed to TV, which is a "sit back" experience. More relaxing. Viewing on a phone or tablet is comparable to a "sit back" experience, (and I happen to know people who only use the internet on their phone -they are out there..). 

Something to consider. ;)

For quite a number of years, I participated on a forum which discusses "adventure motorcycling." The site is enormous, with hundreds of thousands of members from all parts of the globe.

I had numerous maps, ride reports, and discussions which amounted to hundreds of hours of labor posted there.

Last year, the administrators decided to upgrade to the latest version of their hosting software. It appears that the major change was to enable a more Facebook-like, chat-friendly format. In my opinion, the "upgrade" was a complete failure. Many others I've spoken to agree. The format we'd been accustomed to for many years vanished in a day. I cannot find or share posts that I made or share information with any flexibility. It's not as if I'm at all computer illiterate. I've been using personal computers since they existed, and worked on mainframes before that. I'm not much on HTML, but I used to be able to interpret a Postscript "stack dump," and I used CPM and DOS version 1.

"New" isn't always better. Microsoft has proved that handily quite a number of times. While the JRA forum is not the newest and flashiest, it works reasonably well. It's also lightweight in comparison to many others. If I was on a sketchy marina connection trying to figure out a problem on the 9 year-old laptop that accompanies me on the boat, I'd far rather deal with a slightly stodgy look and feel than wait 20 minutes for stunning graphics to load. (And the inevitable advertising as well.)

In New England, we say, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." I hardly think this format has outlived its usefulness.

I set up this site, way back in 2010. At that time, WA was very much simpler - it really was "Websites for Dummies", which is what I needed, as I had no previous experience.

Since then, and especially with v.5, it's become more complicated and less intuitive. OK, you can now do more things with it, if you have the skill, but I rather think that WA have lost track of who their core market is, ie, the average Club Secretary who has average computer skills, can manage Office software without problems, but has no experience of website design and doesn't want to get too involved in it, as he has other more important thing to do.

as far as the appearance of this site goes,the webmaster could change this with one click of the mouse, if it were thought desirable. There are many templates available, it's a simple matter of choosing one. But I took the view that our membership ranges from the fully-skilled, HTML at their fingertips, down to those who scarcely know how to operate a computer keyboard. We should, I believe, keep the presentation very plain, concentrating on content, and steering clear of the full-on eye-catching pizzazz that I see on some other sites.

I would like to see some reorganisation of the content we already have, and of course the addition of more content, but festina lente, please, for the benefit of those with a lower level of computer skill. I, too, would like to see pages that are quicker to load and easier to work with on slow-speed connections, and low-capacity devices, but when I looked at this, I found that it would be necessary to duplicate all the pages, in essence making a new site in parallel to the existing site, and doubling the work of the webmaster's team. Possible, I suppose, if there were a webmaster's assistant who would take this on as his sole responsibility... But there would have to be two sets of fora,and this would inevitably lead to a split in the membership, depending on which site they patronised. All in all, I think we have pretty much correct as it is. Apart from adding content and organising that content well. It's down to us, the members, to supply the content. Only then can the current web team begin to work with it.

The only change I'd like, though I suspect it would be difficult to implement, would be for the search engine to look at content rather than just topic headings, like a proper Google search, since the heading s don't always fully reflect content.  Otherwise, I find it an easy site to navigate and interact with on my laptop computer.