EBU Map Improvements

The map on our website, showing the locations of all our clubs and teachers, launched in August and was very well received. Newcomers could now find clubs in their local area without having to know anything about the sometimes unusual county boundaries. Students could see quickly what teaching was on offer in their region. Information was presented in a much clearer and more accessible fashion. And there was a lot less clicking to do all round.

But it wasn't perfect and, as one of the most popular functions of our website, we wanted it to be better. So today we've updated it with some new features.

We've made it look a little neater in places. The club and teacher markers on the map are smaller and look slicker. The old markers occasionally overlapped each other, obscuring the one underneath, and this problem is slightly lessened.

You can now do local google searches within the map by clicking on the control at the bottom left. So you can look up things like the chippies in the Bedford area, for that pre-bridge dinner.

Some people have expressed concern that the map runs slowly on older computers or computers without broadband. For those people, we provide a simple text version of all the map's information. Just click the golden link at the top of the page. You'll see a list of counties and clicking one will give a list of the clubs affiliated to that county.

We're now marking National Pairs heats on the map (and there's a menu item to show them as a list on the text version). They show up with a black corner rather than the usual white and the date of the heat is given below the sessions information. It might be a little hard to pick out black-cornered markers from white-cornered ones, so one of the checkbox options is to hide everything but the clubs with heats. This should make it very easy to find heats in your local area. If you're organising a heat and it's not on the map then let us know.

There are one or two other minor feature changes which I'm sure you'll notice as you go along.

A lot of these changes were made because some of you took the time to give me feedback and tell me about the things you didn't like or felt could be improved. I'm very grateful for that. Please keep doing so, either by email or by leaving a comment.