📔 Editor's Letter - February 2022
Hello & welcome!
It's needless to point out that the past few years have been exceptionally strange for everyone, but here at Bike Wales, all the closures, lockdowns, and restrictions have given us the time to reflect on the nature of our blog — what we like and dislike, what we're trying to achieve (what is the point of the whole thing, really?), and what we'd like to do differently going forward.
2022 is also the culmination of our first 10 years of fantastic cycling in Wales and we thought it a significant point in time to renew our efforts. So, we're starting off our second decade with an entirely new blog design featuring many of the improvements you've requested, as well as some of our own ideas that have been taped to the sides of the drafting table (remember those?)
The first and most obvious change you should have noticed is that we've made everything larger! From our overall page layout, to our images, to our charts & graphics, even our text is bigger now. But with this design change, came a HUGE consideration — one that we didn't take lightly... that is accessability on mobile devices.
"Responsive design" is all the rage with contemporary Internet design. That is; writing the code so that your website adapts to fit the smaller screen and aspect ratio of mobile phones versus tablets, laptops, or desktop displays. After lengthy discussions and debate, we chose to not support responsive design for several reasons: first, we have a huge legacy site, 10 years of writing, posting photographs, and creating charts of which there is absolutely no way our small team could go back and reformat. Secondly, much of our embeded content is simply not viewable on mobile devices anyway. All of our tables and charts are not scaleable — and will never display correctly on the small screen of a phone. And then all our embeded maps are just too big to be of any use on a small screen.
It was a very tough call, but in the end we felt strongly that we wanted to make the new design work with the old (i.e., without a jarring shift in visual presentation). We wanted the new site to appear as if it had evolved or rather "grew" into it's present form. And lastly, our readers were asking for the photos and charts to be larger — which means they are not looking at the site on mobile phones anyway.
We want our readers to sit down and relax... to spend time reading and viewing images, enlarging maps, and quite simply — our desire is for you to drift away into another world, a world of leasurely cycling and stunning landscapes and captivating imagery. If there is one model we can point to as our inspiration, it is that of The Accidental Tourist. While the character Macon Leary writes travel guides for reluctant business travelers, which detail how best to avoid unpleasantness and difficulty. We want to write travel guides for the wishful cyclist, which detail all the best routes and interesting places to visit on your bicycle with the ease and comfort of your home. 🚲
- muse kidd
► For a thorough outline of seven signifcant changes, check out: A Brief Tour.
2022 is also the culmination of our first 10 years of fantastic cycling in Wales and we thought it a significant point in time to renew our efforts. So, we're starting off our second decade with an entirely new blog design featuring many of the improvements you've requested, as well as some of our own ideas that have been taped to the sides of the drafting table (remember those?)
The first and most obvious change you should have noticed is that we've made everything larger! From our overall page layout, to our images, to our charts & graphics, even our text is bigger now. But with this design change, came a HUGE consideration — one that we didn't take lightly... that is accessability on mobile devices.
"Responsive design" is all the rage with contemporary Internet design. That is; writing the code so that your website adapts to fit the smaller screen and aspect ratio of mobile phones versus tablets, laptops, or desktop displays. After lengthy discussions and debate, we chose to not support responsive design for several reasons: first, we have a huge legacy site, 10 years of writing, posting photographs, and creating charts of which there is absolutely no way our small team could go back and reformat. Secondly, much of our embeded content is simply not viewable on mobile devices anyway. All of our tables and charts are not scaleable — and will never display correctly on the small screen of a phone. And then all our embeded maps are just too big to be of any use on a small screen.
It was a very tough call, but in the end we felt strongly that we wanted to make the new design work with the old (i.e., without a jarring shift in visual presentation). We wanted the new site to appear as if it had evolved or rather "grew" into it's present form. And lastly, our readers were asking for the photos and charts to be larger — which means they are not looking at the site on mobile phones anyway.
We want our readers to sit down and relax... to spend time reading and viewing images, enlarging maps, and quite simply — our desire is for you to drift away into another world, a world of leasurely cycling and stunning landscapes and captivating imagery. If there is one model we can point to as our inspiration, it is that of The Accidental Tourist. While the character Macon Leary writes travel guides for reluctant business travelers, which detail how best to avoid unpleasantness and difficulty. We want to write travel guides for the wishful cyclist, which detail all the best routes and interesting places to visit on your bicycle with the ease and comfort of your home. 🚲
- muse kidd
► For a thorough outline of seven signifcant changes, check out: A Brief Tour.
