The website for Financial Management for Business – an innovative business finance foundation course – went live this afternoon. This is to reinforce the publication next Monday of the book that accompanies the course.

The FMFB course is a unique way of mastering the foundations of financial management. Through a series of interactive simulations and online self-tests, participants develop an intuitive understanding of financial management and new business skills that can be immediately applied in the workplace.

Not a major re-design at first glance (and nothing that affects this blog) but making the menu fixed to the bottom of the browser window on the main site involved making a lot of changes. The page will disappear under the menu if the page is long enough to scroll under a background PNG with graduated transparency.

In order for this not to be broken in IE6 I’ve got a conditional stylesheet that takes away the PNG and stops the menu being fixed. I tried all of the various PNG fixes, but having a combination of a fixed element and a PNG background image stopped the links working. Yet another of IE6’s bizarre little ways. Won’t it be good when it finally goes the way of all old browsers.

While I was doing this I took the opportunity to update the folder structure which had grown a bit unwieldy over the years. Checking all the links on the site – nearly 40,000 – and then working out the best way to do 301 redirects in the .htaccess file was fun. Thanks go to Michael Fesser for advice on the use of RedirectMatch and regular expressions.