If you are reading this message, congratulations you have managed to find the all new British Trams Online News page! This new look page really is a new era for news on this website as it will now enable the news to be updated on a daily basis if required by any member of the BTO team. The downside of this new look page is that we lose our unique design and now have a standard blog design of which you will probably recognise from countless other websites but we think that is a small price to pay to enable us to bring you UK tram and light rail news as soon as it happens!
The previous design of the news page (as with the rest of British Trams Online) meant that each page had to be individually formatted by yours truly with any photos adding to the time that this took. On a busy news week (which almost seems to be every week at the moment!) this could take upwards of two hours and to be honest it isn’t exactly the most exciting aspect of running a website such as this! So with the increasing length of time I seemed to be spending on the weekly news updates something had to give!
At the start of November we decided that the best way to go would be to use a blog as the news page which would enable any member of the British Trams Online to upload news stories at any time in the week. Unfortunately we have been experiencing technical problems with the blog and what you see in front of you now isn’t actually the original blog we were trying to use but it was decided that this was better than having nothing – especially as it takes a bit of pressure off me from formatting the large amount of news each week.
So from now on the news page will no longer be limited to once (or maybe twice if you were lucky!) a week updates and we should be able to bring you all the big tram and light rail news stories in the UK not long after they break. The reality is a lot of the more minor stories will still mainly be reported at the weekends because that is when we have more spare time and the main body of the site (homepage, fleet lists, galleries, diary of events etc.) will still mainly be updated at the weekend. But many of the bigger stories will now be
reported on during the week so please check this page regularly!
There may well be some teething problems with this blog and if something isn’t displaying as it should please email gareth.bto@hotmail.co.uk and it will be looked into. I do know there are problems with pictures showing correctly on Internet Explorer 6 but as this is a heavily out of date browser we are unlikely to be able to do anything about it and suggest you upgrade to a modern version.