Hi ladies and gentlemen. Today we’ve got some exciting news for you regarding our website, as well as a sneak peek at some of our recent adventures soon to go online! The most obvious change you may have already noticed is our new website header; featuring the BTP boys – myself and Joe. The original cartoony header was only initially intended as a place-holder, and we felt we needed to put back our faces on our work! We hope the gritty font style restores some of the outdoors hands-on feel to our otherwise clean and modern website.
We’d like to announce that BeyondthePoint.co.uk has finally been optimized for mobile devices; including iPads, tablets, and smartphones of all kinds. We know how important this is considering that in this day and age many viewers use these devices rather than a laptop or computer. After constructing the website ourselves a year ago, we found that we could not make the content of our articles fit the width of both desktop and mobile devices, leaving images and text running off-screen. With the help of professional web developer Dan Barrett we have managed to solve this. After asking for help with our problem in an online forum he was kind enough to assist us with this free of charge and for that we are extremely grateful. Otherwise, we’re not sure if the site would ever have been mobile-compatible! You can learn about his work at I Am Dan Barrett if you have any WordPress.com design and development queries; the world’s leading website creation platform with which we build BTP.
Our mobile site is complete with a user-friendly menu in the top left corner to explore the sections of our site; such as to search by location, type, or sift through our general history articles, guides, and see all our videos. Mobile devices are a great way to view our 360 images. Tilt your phone to explore historic locations for yourself in virtual reality!
We have also been looking into improving the performance of our website. The media-heavy nature of our site means pages can take a good couple of seconds or more to load along with our photo galleries. We’ve been tweaking the size of our photographs the try and speed this up a little which we will continue to investigate. Please bear with us when opening our website pages – no page should take any longer than a minute to load and once you start scrolling you will find our images will appear.
Where are we exploring this summer?
In other news, we’ve been very busy exploring as usual! We are finishing up our reports from exploring Cliffe marshes in Kent at Easter. You may have seen our coverage of the ruined Nore Sea Fort and the Industrial Air Raid Shelters – we also have content coming up for the ruins of Cliffe Cement Kilns, Explosives Factory, and Hans Edege shipwreck. Early in June we were lucky enough to be shown around a replica Iron Age Roundhouse in the Hadleigh Downs; given free reign to try out everything from ancient grindstones to Roman and Celt weaponry, which should make for a very exciting documentary! Joe recently sat in the cockpit of the Avro-Vuclan bomber at Southend Airport which makes for an excellent virtual 360. He also visited the enormous sound mirrors built to detect enemy aircraft at Abbot’s Cliffe, Kent. As for myself, I wandered out to sea closer to home in Chalkwell following some very old oyster fishing causeways and the infamous Crowstone. Last week, we both checked out a heap of huge concrete barges used in the D-Day Invasions wrecked on the Thameside shores of Rainham – similar to the one once wrecked on Canvey Island. We also explored the fascinating remains on RAF Hornchurch. You can watch my sneak-peek video of a Tett gun turrett below from our Facebook page where you can find exclusive content before it makes its way onto this site. As we speak, Joe is touring Northern France and looking at remains and memorials from the First and Second World Wars. Keep your eyes peeled for all this content over summer 2017.
