Welcome to Blue Arena

The new website for Schreuders Sport International, a wholesaler and importer of sports-related products, was launched on 4th June 2010.

Schreuders Sport International (SSI) were running their old ERP system for over 20 years before finally moving to a new software supplier in May 2010. Blue Arena was responsible for migrating all data to the new system to the satisfaction of all involved, including accounting and customs auditors.

The new ERP is fully integrated with the website, allowing real-time communication of product pricing (tailored to a particular logged in client), and stock availability.

Much effort has been made to improve the user experience of the website, as well as the overall design. Users can now fly around the site using a number of searches, filters and menus.

Moving to a brand new system after 20 years isn't easy, and testing of the online ordering system is happening while SSI is getting things under control. We look forward to "flipping the switch" soon!

– www.schreuderssport.nl designed by Laura Bor, Niels Emck, Jamie Morris & Steve McGill

A lot of sites these days use breadcrumb trails to make navigation easier for their users. This is essentially a list of every parent category/section of the page you're on, and might look something like this:

Home > About us > Meet the team

Each of these is typically a hyperlink back to the relevant section. Now these are great, but what happens if your breadcrumb isn't that small? It's easy to see a situation where you have a bunch of really long titles that cause the breadcrumb to span over two or three lines. This isn't always what you want, since it can make the breadcrumb look broken. You might just decide to make some of the titles smaller, but with content managed sites and page names stuffed with SEO keywords, this is often easier said than done.

…

I recently had to write a javascript function that would be used across several sites, and it would call another function that might or might not exist on any of these sites.  There are probably a couple of ways you could get around the inevitable error caused by calling a function that doesn’t exist (I’m thinking some sort of overload here), but I found that the simplest method is to wrap the function call in an if statement like so:

if(typeof myFunction == 'function') {
	myFunction();
}

Handy, huh?

Gallery Carousel is a JQuery Plugin which creates a sliding gallery of image thumbnails that can be clicked to view a full size image.  The full size image can also have a caption and/or hyperlink.  The plugin is configurable and easy to set up, requiring little markup.

…

Gallery Carousel does what it says on the tin. It’s part image gallery, part carousel. It provides an unordered list of images which can be scrolled horizontally. When an image is clicked or the list is scrolled, the main image is updated to the larger version of the thumb. In order to use Gallery Carousel you must include jQuery 1.3.2 before you create a new carousel. Creating a carousel requires relatively little markup, just a list of images, a couple of links to navigate and an image to represent the full size image.

…

Rounded corners have long been a hot topic for web developers, with several methods out there, each with their benefits and disadvantages.  Although rounded corners seem to have fallen out of favour recently in favour of simple, clean designs, they still remain a powerful tool in any designer’s arsenal, which means knowing how to create them is essential.  This tutorial will show you how to create tableless rounded corners than scale with fluid width and height, and can be expanded on to incorporate drop shadows or custom borders. …

On August 1st, 2001, Microsoft revealed their newest browser, IE6, which replaced IE5.5.  IE6 came bundled with Windows XP, and as such became the most used browser of its time.  In fact, when Internet Explorer 7 was release in October 2006, IE6 continued to hold a greater market share than its successor for almost a year.  Eventually users began to move onto IE7, and many even shifted to Mozilla Firefox, the open source browser.  At the time of writing, IE6 still holds an impressive ~17% of the market, which I put down to one factor: Windows XP. …

There are a host of reasons to upgrade your browser.  I’m going to make an assumption that most people using an out of date browser are using Internet Explorer 6, as it ships with Windows XP and still holds a 17% market share.  Here are some reasons to upgrade: …