Welcome to the new FRCC website layout. The site also has a raft of new features to support, in particular, the climbing related pages. Hopefully the new style will be well received. Please feel free to comment below with your feedback or any queries…

There are loads of “behind the scenes” enhancements to the website. However, in the meantime here’s a quick summary of the main user facing features that you might like to check out:

• The whole website has a new cleaner layout that is particularly targeted at providing a better experience for visitors browsing the site on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Of course these layout enhancements should also benefit traditional PC users too.
• There’s a new horizontal, more traditional, main menu. The FRCC banner in the page header will scroll off the top of the browser view as one scrolls down on longer pages. However, the menu itself will fix to the top of the window to ensure that the menu is always readily available to help navigate around the website. A nice visual touch is that the FRCC logo will “pop” into the Home menu item as the header scrolls off the top. On mobile devices the menu is replaced will a pop-up menu.
• Featured images (the large images that appear at the top of some pages) will not show on mobile devices. Nor will they be printed if you print the web page from your browser, this is to help save expensive printer toner.
• Also to help save printer toner, the header will “invert” to a white background with FRCC-purple text and logo when printed.
• The menu will not print, again to save printer toner.

With respect to printing from the website, it may be useful to consider learning how to print to PDF directly from your browser… All Apple Macs and newer MS Windows PCs (at least from Windows 10) support this capability. With older versions of Windows you may need to install a virtual PDF printer driver. A paid-for virtual PDF printer driver for Windows is available from Adobe and a popular free driver is available from Cute.

• When a user who is not logged in visits a page that is intended for members-only they are presented with a more friendly message about needing to be logged in to view the page content. Plus, all such pages now immediately show a login form to allow users to quickly access the members-only content.
• The All Articles, various news (such as Climbing News), and the Home Page indexes all present as text based lists (not the pictorial grid as seen in some cases before).
• The site now uses two sans-serif fonts PT Sans and Raleway (main text and headings respectively). These fonts are very similar to Myriad Pro as used in FRCC guidebooks. But they are provided (and recommended in this heading and main text pairing) by Google Fonts and are therefore free for the FRCC to use.
• Paging through the various indexes of website pages is now accompanied by a page count where the current page number is in fact a field where you may enter a given page number, press Enter, and navigate directly to a know page. Perhaps useful when navigating through a long list of new routes.
• The Climbing Area navigator, i.e. the FRCC climbing guidebook coloured box that appears on pages related to climbing areas, is not printed to save on expensive printer toner (see other notes on printing above).
• Comments on new routes flow directly after the routes description and any photos.
• New route pages do not have a heading with the route name as this was duplicated in the route description.
• The new route submission form has been enhanced to allow areas/crags/buttress to be typed or selected from a pulldown.
• There are several enhancements to the new route submission form. These include grade selector dropdowns – first pick the type (Trad or Sport), then the grade dropdown automatically populates itself with the appropriate values. If Trad has been chosen the technical grade dropdown also appears.
• The new route comment form has also been enhanced.
• A new crag/buttress submission form has been created to allow users to immediately create new route submissions at a new crag/buttress/etc. Detailed location, including OS grid ref., as well as other specific attributes can be submitted.
• There is a new photo submission form to allow people to submit great photos to support FRCC guidebook publications, this website, etc.
• There is a switch on new route listing pages that allows users to either see a paged summary of new routes (each linked to a detail page for that route) or the complete list of all new route details at a given climbing area on a single page. (The switch itself doesn’t print should you wish to print the view to take to the crag.) This switch, when toggled on, provides a way to create a “mini-guide” for a given crag/buttress that shows all the new routes etc. at that location on a single page for printing and potentially taking out with you when visiting the crag/buttress. The “mini-guide” will include all the details, location etc., entered for the new crag on the new crag/buttress submission form. (Take a peek at Fox Crag and toggle the summary switch on and off to see an example.)
• Behind the scenes the FRCC online guidebook editor also has the ability to reorder new route submissions such that the “mini guide” is shown with routes described in the correct order.