The first shakey attempt...
Well, we may not have a decision in the 2020 U.S. presidential election yet, but we do have a new L-5 club website … sort of … which is far more important than inaugurating a new leader of the free world, right? Of course! What else were you thinking? After all, L-5 owners, pilots and enthusiasts in at least 9 countries are represented here, and they’re some of the the most important people in the world (at least to me).
A functional, up-to-date website for happy, well-adjusted L-5 owners and enthusiasts is what the world really needs. It is long overdue but has been a rather arduous journey just to get this far since the last time the old website was in good working order. It went along pretty smoothly for about 12 years, but due to multiple hardware failures, lost data, hackers and viruses, life interruptions, old-dog-new-tricks syndrome, apathy, etc. it languished miserably for the last few years. In fact, I wasn’t even in control of the domain name for awhile and couldn’t update the site.
So, it’s a brave new world and a clean-sheet fresh start. What you are seeing today is the first somewhat shakey attempt to get the new Sentinel Owners & Pilots Association website working on a WordPress platform. It’s far from complete (volunteers…?) but at least it seems to be working, if lacking in content. This new website is best viewed in landscape mode on small devices such as smart phones or small tablets. On larger tablets the portrait mode works fine on some pages and not so well on others yet. Viewed on laptops and desktops it is, of course, automatically displayed in landscape mode. One of several current problems with portrait mode on mobile screens is that the scrolling background images on the home page are not scaling properly and some of the other pages are not centering correctly. As yet a fix hasn’t been found.
But don’t shoot the webmaster for incompetence just yet. So far this has been a one-man effort. It’s been a heckuva lot of work for a spare-time activity and many of the pages are still under construction and without content. I’ll get there eventually, I hope, but the main thing right now is to obtain feedback on the layout and determine if the pages are mostly displaying properly, the links are not broken and it’s not too hard on tired or ageing eyes. I cannot always determine these things when logged into the editor as administrator. I am new* to the WordPress game and it’s just not intuitive for me, but I’m gaining on it.
Anway, after you poke around the new site awhile, please post a comment or email some feedback. I’d like to know what others are seeing or not seeing, as the case may be, and whether you find it easy to use. Any constructive suggestions will be welcomed.
Cheers everybody… Jim Gray, Sentinel Owners & Pilots Association
(*well, not quite new. I tried setting up the forum on WordPress about 5 or 6 years ago as some of you may remember, and I failed miserably).