We've now released the new version of the site. If you have a recent version of your web browser then you will see virtually no difference between this version of the site and the previous one. However, and it's a big however, the new version should be much faster to load. The top menu, and left menus that appear when you click a button should be significantly faster than the previous version.
If you are having a problem with this please try clearing your cache and reloading the site. You should only have to do this once to solve any problems. If your problem sill persists then please contact us via the button above. The old system is still available for a short while
here.
For those who are interested on why it's so much faster a little explanation. The old site used small images for each of it's menu items (one each for Fed ships, Stations, Articles etc). There where also graphics top, bottom, left and right of each to give that 3D look. When you clicked one of these a new menu would often appear on the left hand side of the window. This menu was also made using graphic images, the fed ships menu used 69 of these images to make it work. Now your web browser would download the menu and then have to download each of the graphics a few at a time. If you clicked on a menu you hadn't been to in a while you could often see this happening, buttons would appear bit by bit until the menu was complete.
Now the new version of the site gets rid of all the graphics for the menus. It simply contains some formatting instructions to tell your web browser how to display the menu items. So instead of a graphic with an orange background and black text drawn on it, we have a little html and a little css code to say draw it a certain height, width, colour etc. Because there is only two files to download (one for html and one for css) there's a lot less to download, so things go very much faster. You should find that the menus display almost instantly and never one button at a time.
This new system also tells your web browser what font to use to do the drawing. Most modern browsers can also automatically download a font to use with the web page. This is the case with Firefox 3.5.x, IE 6, 7 and 8, Safari 3 and 4. The next version of Opera (10) will also support this. If you don't have one of these you will still get a good menu, it will just have a different font. All you have to do to get the site to work better it get the latest version of your favorite web browser. Given they're all free that shouldn't be too much of a problem.
