We're currently busy with a technical update for the website.
After the makeover the content will still be 100% the same, and the lay-out for 95%. The 5% changes in the latter will be improvements I believe.

The advantage of the new pages will be:
- Better performance, especially for some of the pages that were slow now or which I had to keep static to hide that they were terribly slow.
- Better usability on devices such as smartphones and tablets (the pages scale automatically, so you will not have to horizontally scroll anymore)
- Improved security.
- Less work for me to maintain.

The first of such pages is live now: the Connections homepage. So check it out, and if you notice weird things let me know. Thanks a lot to nfmungard who used his IT brains once again to create this.

Nan & I have to keep on travelling too of course, so I don't know when all will be finished.

I also have closed the user login because I want to make some changes in that part of the site also. This will only take a couple of days, so hold your reviews and updated counts back for a short while. There's enough to read at the moment I believe, with the many new reviews of Clyde, Michael Novins, Wojtek and others (and my blog post about Nesvizh of course...).

Well done for the updates! I just check out the connections page. Minor typo or font problem - when clicking on the Zurich hotspot the ü is not visible, instead Z?rich is displayed on my ipad.

Another welcome improvement although possibly more time-consuming would be updating the Map links. Currently by clicking on any WHS on the map, you are redirected to a broken link. Viewing the visited and yet-to-be-visited WHS per user would be a major plus point. As well as an automatic update for the Top 100 users statistics if possible. Other than that, keep up the good work :)

Encoding issue. The data in the database uses different charsets and we need to clean up the data to get this corrected.


We improved the database performance. So, a lot of things that weren't working should be now. I will probably redo the google maps feature with all the different search features, but need some time.

At the moment it either shows well in the new lay-out and bad in the old one, or vice versa. Simultaneously while we're refreshing the page templates, I also fix the characters (change from latin to utf in the database).

Great nfmungard! The map search features per user + visited/not visited would be a great. No hurry, but something I'll be eagerly waiting for in the future.

As quick win I added a link to each location so you can see it in google maps. You will still have to scroll through all, but I will look into that.

The site pages for each world heritage site seem to be online now in the new format. E.g.: http://worldheritagesite.org/sites/site.php?id=1137#review

Feedback appreciated.

What is new about the site:
* The title bar and the logo. You can even click on the images :D
* The layout has been cleaned. Check the boxes, the icons or the user reviews.
* Responsive webpage -> use your phone and check it out.
* Locations are now linked to google maps. In a 2nd step I will add a site map.
* Some backend changes to improve performance.

This sounds promising, hope it isn't too much hassle, but the connections page looks better now, so thanks. Oh I also just noticed we have a browser Icon as well now which is nice.

One thing I've noticed the country drop down list has disappeared from the main page, no worries if it is just a temporary thing whilst works are going on, but just thought I would flag it up in case it is an oversight.

This is great development! Responsiveness makes the site more usable with mobile devices. It works well, as far as I have tested.

I have one small suggestion. I would prefer that the photo strip in the title bar would disappear after the last breaking point when the site is in its smallest, the mobile phone size. This would spare some much needed space when browsing with mobile phone. Now the title bar covers almost two thirds of the whole screen, and whole screen if the menu is open (iPhone SE). In other screen sizes the photos give nice look to the site.

Keep up the good work!

yes, it is temporary; we haven't done the homepage yet

Ah great, I see it is back now which is good as I always use that to navigate through.

One point from using the updated pages for inscribed sites, they look much nicer on my phone (iPhone 5), but with the borders there is quite a bit of the screen width is dead space and that means there aren't many words per line. Normally you can counteract that by switching to text only but that doesn't seem possible with the updated pages.

It isn't a big deal and is certainly something I can live with but just thought I would flag it up.

Thanks Sjobe and meltwaterfalls. I'll put these findings on the list.
We're first trying to convert all individual pages, afterwards we can do some additional tweaking.

Kudos on the site upgrade, Els and Nan -- the site is looking sleek and running well, and I see the updates have finally reached the front page! While I was accustomed to viewing the lists of sites underneath each of the countries on the main list and the tentative list, I think I can get used to this layout, which doesn't require as much scrolling. The user page layout is looking good, too. Thanks for all your work on this!

I was too. Maybe I will revert at least the main world heritage list back to one long list.

We're almost done converting all the page templates, only a few minor ones to do. And Nan is still working on a fancy new community page.

The aim is to have everything done before I leave for South Africa in just over a week's time.