I have finally finished all of the work on the new site design: everything has been updated and changed to the improved templates. A short note to all visitors to School of Puppetry: the site is fairly heavy on the javascript, and the menus won’t work without it. If you have it disabled in your browser, please turn it on when you visit the site. Additionally, the site is best viewed, from best to worst, in: Firefox, Safari, Chrome, IE9, IE8 and IE7. I have not tested in other browsers, and anyone using IE should really get a better browser.  So here’s what else has happened since last I posted:

• The ‘learn more’ template has been updated to reflect the new changes
• Including in this is a top-left-corner short list of handy links when viewing a particular category or tag (ie. if you’re viewing ‘Puppetry Basics & Definitions‘, there will be a link to the glossary and list of puppet types, in the top left corner of the page… so you don’t have to trawl through the posts to find the gems). This was in place before, but there’s improved styling and I’ve also implemented it on tags (which I didn’t even know I could do)
• All Flickr slideshows now appear. It seems as though I hadn’t noticed that my Flickr plugin hasn’t been working.
• The home page has a further improvement: previously I had it set so that it would show four new posts at the bottom of the page. This seemed silly in hindsight given that the navigation link on the bottom of the page takes you to the ‘learn more’ page - which will show the latest posts anyway. So I have changed it so the home page will now show four posts at random from the archives. Hopefully it will mean more people see more content that would otherwise get hidden away.
• The return of the books page. After thinking it was easier to just have book reviews in with the other tutorials and stuff, it seems they get lost and very few visitors are able to actually find them. They can now be found via the ‘books’ link at the top of the template.
• The ‘featured pattern’ on the home page and top of the template (ie. top of every page) will be changed on Sun nights so that all the patterns get rotated regularly (and thereby not get lost in the sea of content)

There are, of course (and as usual), some tiny little itty things that may or may not be fixed as time goes by. Entirely depending on whether I can either: figure it out; be bothered. They really are so tiny as to not warrant much attention.

As I have been literally going from bed to computer to bed for the past several days, I am now taking the opportunity to do  all. Particularly as I have managed to get very frustrated and delete things I shouldn’t and find browser compatibility to be the greatest time waster of all. If you have any problems using the site, please drop me a line via the contact page or in the comments.