Blog #24 - Web site waffle……
After the end of March we will no longer have Anna Gudge (of ECATS) as our web master. She has looked after our web site for quite some time, but now that we have capable resources in-house we have decided to have a go at doing it ourselves. Many thanks to Anna for all she has done for us and although this facet of our involvement is over, we have many other areas that we work with together, for example Simultaneous Pairs.
We already have had a fairly large involvement in the day to day updating of our web site, which is extremely active. The site receives a daily average of nearly 59,000 “hits”. A hit is a relatively inaccurate description of volume as a hit can be the act of downloading a photograph as well as text on the same page, but it provides a guide to activities, so you can tell that we have quite a busy web site.
As with most things in life we struggle to please all of the people, all of the time; we do appreciate that there are many things we can do to improve our web offering and Michael Clark, who takes over as our Web Master from April 1st has many ideas for adding to our already busy and informative site. In the recent past Michael has added a new Calendar facility, which utilises Google Calendars, an available utility from Google. We now have in one place all of our events, including county events and there are facilities available for much more.
For example, Michael will be working on a plan to completely revise our events and results service. This will include direct links from the EBU scoring software to our website making it much easier for quick updating of results. Those results will be stored in a new form, so that when wanting to know something about a particular event, or a particular persons results, all will be available with ease.
Michael, who will be aided by Matt Betts, our Communications Officer, has constructed a programme of improvements which he will work on as soon as he can. I am hopeful that these changes will make our site even more useful and more accurate than it is at present.
This blog is the first that has been written (almost without any technical assistance, I am pleased to say) on the new Blog facility that Michael has set up, again using Google facilities. We will be setting up other blog areas for other aspects of our organisation in due course.
We do have lots of ideas for improvements, but if anyone has any suggestions please feel free to email Michael at his usual email address.
P.S. There are some fascinating things happening on the publicity front - I hope to be able to provide more information very soon.
