about the revamp

At it's last count, the British Mac podcasts were estimated to have an audience of roughly 26,000 listeners. Most descriptions, or pieces of feedback relating to the podcast tend to include reference to the quirky nature of Will Green's presentation style. The BritishMac.com website has also tended to be quirky in nature - which fits well as a companion to the podcast, but has at times lacked some of the underlying structure which would make it easier to navigate around.
Two (potentially conflicting) aims are behind the revamp of the BritishMac.com website. Firstly creating a website which graphically embodies the eccentric spirit of the podcast, while secondly making the website more accessible and generally easier to navigate around. An additional aim of the revamped BritishMac.com website is to enable listeners to British mac podcast to play a part in how the podcast sounds and how the website looks.

what's already happened

Up until now, most of what has happened in relation to the revamp of the British Mac website (referred to throughout this subsection as BritishMac.com) could probably be best described as pondering and planning. It is because everything is still subject to change and nothing at all has been set in tablets of stone that the various bits of documentation which exist often talk about proposed changes

One thing which has happened (and shows some small visible proof that work is going on) is the inclusion of a sitemap within the BritishMac.com website. Several of the existing pages have been given a quick tweak - although because this mainly involved tidying up the code which is hidden behind what is viewed in your web browser it may not be too obvious.
Another small change which should be reasonably obvious if you are reading this of course is the creation of a small 'revamp' subsection of the BritishMac.com website. Time is fairly precious so it is highly unlikely that the Revamp subsection will ever feature any wonderful graphic design layout - by the time there is enough time to spare on such things the revamp subsection will have ceased to need to exist any more!

what's happening next

A street map style plan of the buildings which will make up what is currently being described as 'British Mac Row' is being pondered over and finely tweaked. Once finalised this street map will feature several buildings which in turn will house the content of different sections of the website. The exterior for each of the buildings in British Mac Row will be a real building which exists in the real world. Some careful Photoshopping (or possibly GIMPing) will then stitch the buildings together while hiding the joins (although try not to look too close for the joins on the draft versions of the images!).
Details will eventually be made available somewhere on the BritishMac.com website of the physical location of all the buildings used to create British Mac Row. A selection of the images used to create British Mac Row will also be made available for website visitors to download and re-use. Anyone who has more time and / or skill with the Phototshoping / GIMPing of images will be more than welcome to do a better job of creating alternative images to be used on the website.

Once most of the existing content of the BritishMac.com website has had it's links sorted out and code tidied up (something which is nearly completed), time and attention will be turned to reinstating several features of the website from the past which still remain hidden away on the server, but no longer have any way of being accessed. A few examples of this include the Listener Gallery, Labour Exchange and Frappr Map sections.