Regular users of Schooltechnician.co.uk will notice a small number of improvements to the site that should increase the usability of the site.

When Schooltechnician.co.uk was first created on the Mambo Content Management System, a template was cobled together.  It was not designed with much care and has remained as simply a functional template.

Over the last year, my knowledge of templates has improved somewhat, so I have taken the opertunity to revise the template and put in some new features as well as remove some older ones that are eventially going to be dropped by the Mambo development team.

So what will you notice

1.  The site has a new logo and header section.  The site might load a little quicker now.

2.  The Email, Print and PDF buttons have gone.  The PDF was being removed from Mambo and didn't work with images or tables very well.

3.  The template has been tweaked to use a printer friendly stylesheet.  This removes the adverts and menu bars from a printed page.  There will be less wasted paper as a result.  Go to your browsers File->Print Preview option to see for yourself.

Somethings for the future

For those people who have or are using Mambo, you will know that there has been some development issues causing all of the main developers to resign.  These developers have now banded together to continue working on the mambo code base under a new brandname called Joomla.  This means that there are 2 systems that offer the same features etc.  Until the dust settles and each developer produces there next versions, Schooltechnician.co.uk will be sticking with Mambo.

However saying that if new features are incorporated into Joomla and component developers switch to Joomla, then I may have to switch too.  I will do a little bit of testing before I make the switch as I know that some things will fail to work correctly.

Forums

Every website work there salt seems to have forums on them these days.  I am coming to realise that a forum may be required for Schooltechnician.  Originally I thought that I would just plug other sites like tips4techs.co.uk and edugeek.net, as they have forums that have idential topic areas, so I would avoid duplication and extra administration.

Having a forum would allow visitors to signup and comment on articles that are on the website.  Schooltechnician.co.uk gets a lot of people visiting, hopefully the information they find is relevant.  Getting more people to join the site might also increase the number of articles that are written.

Money for old rope

Schooltechnician.co.uk is currently run as a hobbie and gets the odd article when I can find the time to write one.  There aren't as many articles as I would hope to write as I have a conflict of interest with my place or work.  Sadly I can't write about everything I discover in my line of work due to the sensitive nature or revenue potential that could be lost by offering information for free.

The site has been running Google Ads for a number of months now and so far hasn't generated much revenue to cover the running costs of the site.  However visitors have clearly been interested in some of the products and services that have been advertised.  Don't be afraid to click on a Google Ad, they don't bite.

The site also has an associate account with Amazon.co.uk.  This gives the site another great potential for generating revenue and at the same time provides links to books, media and electronics that visitors may find useful.

Progress always seems slow until you look at all that has been acheived.  So with over 19,000 visitors Schooltechnician is certaintly a site that will soldier on.

Happy 2006 Everyone!