Reason for the change

I was receiving an increasing number of reports that the old website was very slow to play and download the files. And when they did play there was often lots of stuttering and stopping.

Also, I was beginning to experience difficulty when editing or adding pages. The first two or three hours of the day were fine, but everything would slow down, so much so that, by lunchtime, the admin side would freeze altogether.

The website building software people, and the webhosts, investigated the problem, but were unable to come up with a solution, other than to ask me to reduce the number of pages!

The new site

I am now using WordPress to manage the site.

One important change I have decided on is that there will be no traditional indexes. These were taking me an inordinate amount of time to keep updated, and were prone to errors on my part. (During the transfer process I kept discovering titles that were not in any of the indexes.)

Instead, the new site has a Search box. Into this you type one or two keywords from the title of the piece your are searching for, together with the composer/arranger (optional), and you should come up with a short list of titles.

I have also applied Categories to each title; you can enter a Category into the Search box, and you will end up with a list of pieces quite similar to the indexes on the old site.

Later I will add tags, like “Upper Voices”.

I am barely scratching the surface with WordPress. For example, I could let you just click on any of the Categories I have applied, and it produces a list of the pieces in that Category.

Unfortunately I am unable to get it to order these items alphabetically. I understand that css style sheets control much of this but, despite the huge number of tutorial videos available, I am unable to get it to play ball.

So, if there are any expert WordPress users out there, any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks…

… must go to Roy Dolan, who gave a lot of time to cleaning up the old files for me. The files had somehow accumulated a great deal of extraneous code over the years, and he devised an efficient system to pare the files down to their essentials, and also to ensure the links would still work. As fast as I sent him files to work on, they appeared to come back even faster! Without Roy’s help this whole process would have taken so much longer than it has.

In Conclusion

I hope you like the new site.

I suspect there may have been errors introduced during the transfer process. One that I am aware of is that quite a number of the Scorch files have become corrupted. Some I have spotted and corrected, but there will be quite a few there that I don’t know about. In the New Year I will go through them systematically; in the meantime, for those of you who use the Scorch files, if you find any that don’t work do let me know.

If you do come across any error or anomaly, do let me know.

Cheers,
JohnF