Changes to our Walks

We had an email last month from a user of our site. It all started well:

Only just found this site last night, and it's brilliant.

So we liked him already!

But then he went on to say:

Overall, it's fantastic, but you give distance in kilometres, but I'm sure last time I looked, distances are in miles. I appreciate there are those that might want us to speed towards more metrication, so could you put miles/kms, satisfying all. I was going to say satisfying the younger generation, but in fact they still use miles too!

This is something we had been planning to do right from the start with WalkLakes. Our plan was to record all distances in metres and kilometres but have the option for visitors to toggle to yards and miles (while retaining elevations in metres rather than feet as OS maps only give heights in metres now). However for one reason or another we never got around to putting that toggle facility in.

Signpost with a view (but no distances), Low Arnside

Looking at it again it dawned on us that we didn't need a toggle, better to just display both. So now all horizontal distances are displayed in metric with the imperial distance in brackets afterwards.

This doesn't just apply to the headers either, it's also done in the text. So here's a screen shot of step 1 of our walk The Old Keswick Railway Line and Latrigg:

And you can see there where it says "400m" it now says "440 yards" in brackets afterwards. That happens all the way through on all our walks, both in the description at the top and in the walk steps.

And my only other negative is the print option. Would it not be better to have just the instructions, rather than including the pics and obligatory 'elf 'n' safety'. By so doing, costs and wastage are kept to a minimum.

We liked this idea too (although not dropping the "elf 'n' safety", by which he means the legal wording on the front page of our walks when you print them out) so all our walks now come with two printable versions in Abode/PDF format: with and without photographs.

Tagged: walks

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