Designer's notes
Design platform
Help
Version history (anoraks only!)

Roadmap for 2010

Keeping the show on the road during 2009 proved a lot more challenging than expected. The author is used to working to deadlines but sometimes ended up running around like the eponymous hero within the opera Figaro. Compiling pages for workshop procedures at night, after the fact, exposed weaknesses in that writing the text, it became obvious that more photographs were needed. Worse still, working with a huge sprawling archive of images scattered over a number of computers, it was sometimes tricky to recall where things were!

During this month (June) the long-awaited SAAB NG900 & 9-3 Buying Guide has not only been uploaded but also revised. This particlular undertaking has run nearly 6 months behind schedule and the knock on effect has altered the time frame for other page development within the website. One problem has been the loss of a number of images that were stored on CD - over time, the images have become corrupt and those that can be read have varying degrees of the image replaced by a grey bar. This has resulted in the author appealing to readers on the front page of the website to supply photos of their own cars but alas, there have been no takers so far!

Looking ahead more than 4 months, readers can expect the articles and procedures part of the site to grow slowly also but much will depend on other factors - rebuilding an engine is one thing, rebuilding it and photographing every step is quite another thing! Readers and some SAAB dealership staff provide snippets of information but some weeks there simply isn't enough new material to warrant writing a new page for the articles section.

During the year, we will also be clearing some of our spares because we may have to relocate, so keep checking the Bazaar section regularly for details.

Designer's notes

One of the challenges for today's website designer is to make the site accessible to the largest feasible number of people. In addition to the diverse range of screen sizes now available -including widescreen- the designer has to consider that not every user will be running some flavour of Windows. Worse still, there are rather more browsers available now than when the author was a Business Computing under graduate. Then, everyone seemed to run Netscape Navigator but the author had just acquired a new Dell Pentium 200 running Windows NT - a serious piece of kit in 1997- and Sunderland University's servers were used to download a version of Internet Explorer that would actually work with NT. Happy days - even if downloading a couple of floppies (remember them?) worth of browser took nearly 2 hours!

Today, the market has changed, largely due to Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with each new operating system and although Netscape still exists, alternatives such as Firefox, Safari, Opera and of course Google's offering Chrome have found many friends. The proliferation of browsers does make life harder for the designer because unwanted and unexpected effects can creep in, such as tables or images overlapping text such that it is unreadable.

The problem with website content is tricky: it is all too easy to end up with pages that are too slow to load or require readers to scroll but a lot of smaller pages creates navigation issues and fragments the reading experience. For this reason, larger features like the Buying Guides have been split into two pages and the photographs have been scaled down and optimised to reduce page loading times for those still using 56k dial up access.

Design platform

The author has used previous versions of Dreamweaver and there was a great temptation to use the web site as a vehicle to play with all the Spry widgets in the toolbox. The navigation could have been via a great looking Spry menu but there is potential for grief in that older browsers don't support this type of menu. Sparing use has been made, therefore, of Spry tabbed panels and accordions in a 'test the water exercise'.

Help!

We need to know about serious usability issues with the site and would be grateful for readers taking the trouble to advise us of issues that have arisen. On the other hand, help is a two way thing and if readers have any good ideas or suggestions that would improve the website layout, do let us know. One on-going project is to assemble timelines for the cars, as establishing when changes to the various models occurred is tricky because sources consulted seem to contradict each other.

Help readers outside the UK can give: we are aware that NG900/9000/9-3 & 9-5 models were offered in
different forms, according to destination markets. We are especially interested in hearing from readers in the US & Canada, Australia & New Zealand who may be able to advise us about specification changes.

Version history

The author's best friend 1anson suggested some time ago that a version history section was perhaps more useful in giving readers a better perspective of the site than adding a 'page updated...' footer at the bottom of each page. Accordingly, the site revision history appears below:

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