This evening we’ve made a change to the way the Season Ticker tool is delivered to our visitors in the sidebar. In order to improve the performance of the site, we’ve removed the Ticker from the initial load of our pages and made it available via a button in the sidebar in it’s original position.
The Ticker now loads separately and on request in your sidebar when required. Members will of course have access to the Members version of the Next Six Ticker as before.
The change was implemented specifically to improve the page load times for users of Internet Explorer versions 7 and 8 – both of which were suffering issues with the Ticker code. Users of these browsers should experience far better loading times but are still encouraged to upgrade to version 9 in order to view the site and specifically the Ticker at its best. We still have some bugs associated with the Ticker in IE but we are now working to resolve these.
All users should experience an improvement in page load time however and, by introducing this button, we are now able to keep the Ticker available on all article pages and usable by our visitors when required. This will enable us to develop the tool further, without concern for the initial page load times.
Following this change, we have further optimisations to make to the new design as we continue to tweak following the recent change over.
As always, thanks for your patience, feedback and support in helping us improve the site.
