*Website Update* – V5.0

After many months of coding and styling, SurgeryWeb are pleased to announce that there is a major update in the SurgeryWeb Practice website theme.

This update may not look too different to you on the front-end, however the website has been re-built from the ground up using an updated framework which will make future enhancements much easier to come by. As well as structural improvements behind the scenes, the website is much more responsive for tablet and mobile devices, and we have also improved some of the features, added some new settings, but more importantly we have been working on Accessibility WCAG compliance and GDPR compliance.

When will my Practice get the update?

This deployment has already started but will take around 2 months to complete because unfortunately it is not an update we can just overwrite your current website with. This update contains features that require some manual copying of your content in to new fields and also manual installation of some new tools to run in the background such as the new anti-spam software provided by CleanTalk and an updated Analytics widget for your dashboards.

Can’t wait to see it? The new theme is up and running on our demo website which you can see at https://demo.surgeryweb.org.uk

Here are some of the more apparent changes:

Header styling – The positioning of your Practice details and the open/closed indicator will move around depending whether you have a logo/image uploaded and also if you have more than 1 branch/location listed, we have tried to reduce the vertical spacing as much as possible but are aware that if you have 3 or more branches then this can take up a fair bit of space at the top of your website.

Menu structure – The menu structure now follows the web standard of opening sub-menus on click rather than on hover which improves accessibility on tablet/mobile devices as you simple cannot hover a mouse over something when using a mobile. Clicking the top-level menu item will open the drop down submenu, and top-level menu items should be duplicate within the submenu.

Scrolling ticker and slideshow gallery – These features now have pause/play buttons as it is a WCAG Accessibility requirement to provide the user with options to stop animations from running on a web page.

Coloured Tiles – We have added the option for you to move the coloured tiles from the right hand side to span across the top of the page content.

Pop-up boxes – We are using a new pop-up modal for the pop-up message and tiles that link to forms/pop-up content which is more responsive and easier to close.

Full Width page template – We have introduced a new page template for when you want to publish a page without including the right hand sidebar, the content will span the full width of the page, this is very useful for pages that contain wide images or tables.

Practice Staff page – We have amended how the Staff page template works giving you the option to create as many staff groups as you need, and then you can include as many staff members as you need within each group, there is also a content editor available for each staff group. The staff members can still be re-arranged amongst themselves, but you can also re-arrange the staff groups amongst themselves if required.