New FBA Website Coming Soon…
May 30th, 2010
We’re pleased to say that very soon we’ll be launching the new look Free Buddhist Audio! We’ve been working hard at this for many months and should be up and running towards the beginning of July, so we thought it was high time we invited our users to come and see what we’ve got in store…
This is very much a work in progress (we’ll be changing it regularly over the next few weeks) but it’s already functional in various places and it’s kind of geeky fun playing with the new features we’re introducing!
Please feel free to look around, click away and get a feel for the new design. And leave any comments you think would be helpful (encouragement welcome!) below, including anything you find that’s not working (it’s useful to let us know what type of computer and browser you are using – eg windows xp with firefox version 3.6).
Enjoy!
Some things we already know about are:
- Audio previews
- Video
- Online Chat
- Some links aren’t live yet
- New Donations section not live yet – links to old one (so you can still give!)
- Audio download section
- Text version of talk listings
- Adding new images where needed to replace defaults
- Text search
- We’ve heard that some folk are having cookie trouble with the initial splash page for this test version. If you can’t get to the main home page when you try, refreshing the page in your browser should do the trick!
Just popped on to have a look at this and been told I am using an “older browser”. While current versiona of Firefox, Safari, Chrome etc. might be considered “new”, a fully patched and up-to-date IE8 is hardly outdated in my opinion. I write websites for clients – I test in IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. I don’t understand your thinking here especially as IE still has a majority share of the market. Can you explain?
Thanks, Chris
Hi Chris, thanks for your feedback. We decided to include the splash page on browser use because many of our visitors are on older versions of IE than you. We do test for all browsers, and as I think it mentions we will make the site compatible with as wide a range as we reasonably can. However, as you may also know, IE8 – even fully patched, etc. – is not HTML5 compatible, which we will be using where possible for both video and audio streaming. Sadly, as you may have heard too, when HTML5-friendly IE9 comes out in the autumn it will rather inexplicably not install on Windows XP! So, many folk on Windows machines will have to upgrade their whole system to Windows 7 (or Vista?) or change browser… So we thought we’d get that ball rolling in our own community (not always the most up-to-date when it comes to web use) and offer a gentle nudge in the right direction.
Just to reassure, we don’t have any ideological position on browser use – and if you wish to keep using IE8 on your PC as you do presently then the site should work well for you, but you will miss out on a few HTML5 bells and whistles.
Best wishes,
Candradasa