Seed pack labelling

[MatDz]

If I may suggest, having an option to display all positions at once would serve the same purpose as a downloadable PDF I believe, it would also make ordering much faster on larger screens.

Besides that, massive thanks (again) for making this happen!

Do you mean a single long list? It's against good practice advice, as there are accessibility issues again, and takes longer to load on slow connections. I agree it would be good to have the option to display in different ways, so people could choose whether to have a single list or split over pages, but the software doesn't allow that, unfortunately. I'll have a look into it.

It was the latter, very often there's a selector to choose how many items on a page should be displayed, with "all" being the risky, but very useful one. Shame it's not build in.

[el48tel]

A pdf download would be useful. I used to use one either as download or scan of paper version to use in my database of what I had planted rather than type the names out (often incorrectly).

[lyrabelacqua]

Thanks for the kind comments Lyra I will explain why I'm not keen on a pdf on the website. Firstly, though most people will probably not have noticed we've made efforts to try and make the website more accessible to those with disabilities. In particular, we have been careful to remove words in all-caps, ensure that the contrast between text and background is good, and that there is good separation between elements, and that all sections look clear on different devices. We still have a way to go but I think it is improving, slowly but surely. There are some good summaries online about why it is not good practice to have downloadable pdfs on websites, and I've gradually been going through the pdfs we had (inherited from the old website) and converting them instead to actual php web pages. If you do a search for "why it is not good practice to have downloadable pdfs" you'll see there are quite a few other reasons too, apart from accessibility.

The other reason is that I and everyone else involved in the website and the seed shop (and indeed everything else in the BCSS!) are volunteers, doing everything in our spare time. The seed list is continually updated, as seeds go out of stock and new ones come on stream, and so a pdf if going to go out of date very quickly. For example, we have already updated the list six times since the new year. Small updates are done online, so making a pdf would require first exporting all the online seed products to a csv file, removing all the extraneous data, importing to word and formatting to make it readable, compressing, converting to pdf, then re-uploading. When you consider that we have had hundreds of successful online seed orders so far, but only 8 (to my knowledge) requests for printed lists, it is really too much work for the resulting benefits. Colin makes up a printed list as and when required, when asked by people who can't or don't want to go online, but this is quite a bit of extra work and in its spreadsheet form would need further work to convert to pdf. We want to try and encourage as many people as possible to use the online system as it makes everything so much easier for the volunteers.

If I can suggest an alternative, you could highlight the online list on the web page, and copy and paste it yourself into a Word or Excel file; the added advantage being that you could then sort them in whatever way you wanted?

Paul, thanks for the speedy reply. If Colin is only making up the printed list as and when required then I can see it would be an additional, and therefore undesirable, burden to make a pdf, especially given the small number of requests and the rapid changes. I'll go with your helpful cut and paste suggestion.