The website is in a good place so improvements were intended to be smaller and more iterative than previous updates. But a few really important backend changes came together at once making this update bigger than expected. Significant upgrades to the booking system and privacy features were added. With some important accessibility and performance improvements (especially on phones).
V15.0.1 changelog (planned for 15.1 brought forward)
Headerbar- The site logo was removed from desktop and tablet views to make the bar more consistent across the site and load faster. These views have a welcome image on the homepage instead. The logo was kept for mobile to draw attention to the menu button, plus the lack of words mean the sizing bugs didn’t happen on mobile.
V15 changelog
Booking page updates- this was moved to the service providers in-house solution rather than a plugin. It should be more reliable and secure. The times were also moved to be a button within the session types and not separate sessions, adding this functionality from the new version of the booking providers service.
Privacy improvements- The GDPR cookie notice has a bigger banner that will make the use of cookies clearer and a link to the privacy policy. The policy was updated to give more details and reassurance about GDPR compliance.
Accessibility improvements- the website was altered to have better contrasting colours and underline links to assist viewers with visual impairments. The phone UI menu was changed to a button as these are expected on mobile devices and should be easier to understand. The news section was reformatted to take less space, have 3 recent entries and be cards to make clear they are clickable.
Performance improvements- some backend services like cache were updated to improve the sites performance. Images were reformatted as AVIF format. These are much smaller (sometimes 70% smaller) at the same quality so will load much faster.