I've been looking at the navigation and layout of the site to see if it can be simplified and make things easier to find. I have been testing the solution over the last few weeks and it works really well and things seem a little bit faster too. I'll be making the changes today and hope to finish by Midday, 1 April 2013. The forum may be offline intermittently whilst I make the changes between 11am and 12pm.
I am going to remove all the various topic groupings from the forum, so the front page or board index will disappear or merge into one, depending on your point of view. The existing topics and posts will all be moved into a single forum and you can simply scroll through every post at your leisure and choose which one you want to read. There will be no more discussion areas, pictures areas, help sections or rehoming section. It will all fit under one big Schnauzer Forum. I've tried to model it on the Newsfeed feature of Facebook. This will make navigation much easier as there will be no navigation to contend with.
It also makes it easier to post. You no longer have to hunt round trying to decide what section you should post in. If you are a new member, you don't have to worry about whether posting in the 'New Member' section is the right place to say hello. Or if you are worried about the kibble you are feeding your puppy, you no longer have to worry that the 'Feeding' section is the right place to ask the question. You will be able to post anywhere and your question will always be in the right place.
Because everything is now in the same place, I am also going to disable all the search functions. This helps in speeding the servers up as they no longer have to index all the new posts to make them easier to find. The 'New Posts', 'Recent Posts', 'Unread Posts', 'Search' and 'Advanced Search' will all go. All the posts are in the same place on one page, so you can simply scroll down until you find the right topic or post that is of interest. I will retain the ability to search user's posts as I find it useful to see who has contributed the most. I am also doing away with 'View your posts' section. I think we all know what we have posted, so no need to take server time with this unused function.
Also, as we only have to scroll up and down now to see everything, I have also removed the 'Previous' and 'Next' buttons and all the other irritating bits that make the current site easy to navigate.
Lastly, I have come up with a rather cool feature, even if I say so myself. The forum is randomly going to change colour throughout the day. At the moment, you see it as blue, but when you visit again, it may be a lovely shade of lilac or purple or pink or red or green or yellow. Rather than been referred to as the blue forum going forward, we can call it the Rainbow Forum. If you have a favourite colour, please send me a PM and I can add it to the rainbow code. Please don't ask for Pepper/Salt or Black/Silver as you will confuse me.
I hope you all have a lovely bank holiday Monday on this first day of April. Looks like it's going to be a cloudy one, but at least dry for some and great for a walk out in the fresh air. Supportive comments are welcome, of course, but please try not to influence other members who may take a little longer to appreciate these changes.
I'm off to walk the boys and then do some coding. See you later.
the more photos the better for me ! Seeing puppy pictures on here helped me identify which breeder I wanted my next puppy to be from . I can't believe you think they all look the same ? 
