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Mander Organ Builders Forum

Incorporated Association of Organists


Colin Pykett

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Apologies for starting a new topic, but after several searches I could not find an existing one which dealt with the IAO. I've had to spell its name in full in the Topic Title otherwise this forum's search facility would not find it (it seems to require at least 4 characters in each word in the search string, thus the abbreviation 'IAO' is ignored).

 

Anyway, I wonder if anyone has had a look at the new IAO website? (iao.org.uk). Its navigation list (i.e. the links to the other pages which occur as the buttons displayed at the top of each one) does not seem to be complete. For example, the old 'links' page is no longer there, though one can access its updated version by Googling for it independently - for the record, it currently exists at iao.org.uk/links/ as of today. But there then seem to be additional problems. One is that there are links to apparently unrelated pages dealing with things like 'Computer Security', 'Keylogger Software', etc. As a web designer myself my first thought was that the site might have been hacked, and I strongly advise anyone NOT to go to those places by clicking on these links!

 

Of course, maybe the whole site is still under construction. Maybe, also, somebody on this forum knows more?

 

CEP

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It is certainly less than solid at present - entering "iao.org.uk/members/" leads to another set of jumbled links or "iao.org.uk/organ/" yet more.....

 

Clearly it is in the process of being loaded and should shake down in the next 24 hrs but its not a great advert for the webmaster and hosting company's process for developing, testing & making webpages live.

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Wearing my web designer's hat again, I fully empathise with anyone who is trying to get a new site working properly - assuming that is what the IAO is doing. You can test it offline or under various hidden URLs until the cows come home, but eventually you have to take a deep breath, go live on the actual server you will be hosting the final thing on, and debug it from there.

 

In situations like this I simply put a short message on the home page telling visitors what's happening and seek their forbearance!

 

CEP

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I too am a WebMaster (usually building code from scratch) and I agree that live environments do occasionally throw up oddities but I'm afraid I don't accept your premise that the kinds of errors seen here are in this class. Quite simple structured testing processes (established many years ago) would have found them offline (eg links that go nowhere, cobwebs - files left on the server that are no longer linked from anywhere, css text format errors causing lines to overlap - these are not server/version specific but generic faults). Using test environment tools like XAMPP or WAMP or something as crude as QuickPHP would have thrown all of these up as would a visit to the free Google Webmaster Tools webpages.

 

Equally, a quick post go-live test would have found them and they are still there 48 hrs later ...

 

I appreciate this may seem harsh but a basic level of resilience/stability is the norm on the web in 2014 and anything below it rather tarnishes the image of the whole organisation.

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