What do people want from a club website

[stodge]

Im going to be revamping the WCH site this summer..
Ive got ideas of my own + requests from some club members, but often users dont know what they need or like till they get it !!!

What features of your clubs website are good /useful.
What sort of features would you like to see ?

A request Ive had a few times and will be included is a request for lifts / whos going where message board for example

[PorkyFatBoy]

A request Ive had a few times and will be included is a request for lifts / whos going where message board for example

We have one of those and no-one has ever left a message on it.

[Simon]

In reference to the poll I believe that the current UK wide statistics show about 50% of the population having broadband. If I were the one designing then I would be making sure that the homepage, fixtures and results were easily and quickly available to anyone - regardless of connection speed. Then it is the 'extras' where I would consider the visitors needing a faster connection.

I remain to be convinced of the need for clubs to have their own messageboards. I can see them getting little use, due to lack of members.

[chrisecurtis]

Have a look at the SO site. I think it is first class. (I am nothing to do with it, just a user)
The forums have had 253 entries since January, including a lot of practical arrangements.
One thing I like very much is that it has an RSS feed, so I can keep in touch without having to remember to check.

[samsonite]

i wasnt going to get involved, but work is slow today.

broadband should have absolutely no bearing on the site you are creating. if 50% of the uk has broadband, then 50% dont. you have to cater to the dialup massif, absolutely have to. there is nothing that should go on a club site that should slow it down to broadband only load times.

not that i think you were going to anyway.

an rss feed is not essential, but it will be soon, so get it in now. soon everyone will be rockin the rss, so get in ahead of the late starters. rss means you mean business. and it means you can be included in my new project

as for the SO site, usability wise it seems good, but first class it is not. the design for one thing is nasty. there's another point. if you are not a designer, dont try and design. get someone else to do it. maybe you are a designer. i dunno.

message boards only work if a large part of your membership is computer savvy. if not, you open up a divide between the folks who communicate via the board a lot, and those who dont. or you risk it not being used at all. why not just have a link to private forum here (this is not a plug), which means you dont have to set one up, and if it flops you can close it. also it means that your regular users who visit this site only have to go to one forum. lots of people dont like having to check lots of forums as they dont have time.

very easy access to fixtures and results is a must. i mean very very very easy. if possible, links from the frontpage to the newest ones as well as the links from the menus to the main sections.

use css. it only matters to the geeks, but we all know how many of them there are in the sport. and pretty soon it will matter to a lot of people when they finally dump internet explorer.

a decent gallery is needed i think. one that can be easily updated and has a good layout. this does not mean links to pages of thumbnails auto generated from whatever horrific graphics/photo management package that someone in your club has that seems "nifty" cos it can churn out contact sheets of unstyled thumbnails. use gallery 2 or something similar. it can be updated by many different users with no special software and will resize the images etc. and with everyone on the planet owning a digital camera these days, it is important.

most of all, make the site as interactive as possible. the internet is all about communities. so build one. we did. it seems to be working.

sorry, im bored

[stodge]

gallery 2

Can you give me a link.
Ive really only used a combination of AceeDce(however its spelt) Picasa,or Compupic depending on what ive been trying to do for static content.

ie Picassa for JK photos - Compupic for JK maps

Great comments so far - had lots of fun and games 3 years ago when I redid the site last time. I'm aware im never going to please everyone........
http://www.walton-chasers.co.uk (and yes I know it uses frames and yes I know lots of people dont like them and yes it was the last frames site I did.)

SO site - I think its better than samsonite gives it credit for and is way better than most club sites.
- main thing I found strange is the navigation on the right hand side - not sure about the compass pointer though.

[Ed]

whats wrong with frames???? i must be losing touch. or is it just that there are a million naff websites out there that use them.

whats so good about RSS?

what's wrong with frames is that you end up getting the pages (e.g. from a google search) without the frameset = no navigation, no context...

RSS means users can keep up to date with the stuff on your site without having to look at it (use a feed reader/aggregator or just firefox live bookmarks)... quite apart from allowing the content to be displayed on another site with a link back to your own site (see the ukcup results on the nopesport front page and nopesport news on the ukcup.db front page) - everyone's a winner.

[chrisecurtis]

Samsonite said:

if you are not a designer, dont try and design. get someone else to do it.

There are levels of being a designer, like there are levels of being an orienteer or a runner. It's OK to be a "beginner designer" just like it is OK to be a beginner orienteer. But in both fields you can't run before you can walk.

In design terms, keep it simple, keep it very sharply focused on its purpose & intended audience and emulate (copy but not too obviously!) what you think works well for similar purpose and audience elsewhere and you can't go too far wrong.

I don't think the SO site design will win any awards, but it is clean and easy to understand, it presents the information clearly and without fuss and is meeting the needs it is there for. That is good design.

Beginner designers could do worse than read Robin William's books "The non-designer's design book" and "The non-designer's web book".

[samsonite]

looks like i jumped in with my size 12s again without thinking about my wording much.

im not saying that the SO site is not nasty, its just not that great. it all comes down to another issue which i will touch on below.

im also not claiming to be a great designer, at it seems i may have inferred(sp?). i just mean that there are many people that are very very gifted in coding or whatever, and therefore think that they can design a site, which many cant. u often need 2 people to do the job properly.

the thing is, while you are building a site for your members, you are also building it for prospective members. you need to be seen on a level with all the other local clubs in other sports.

oh, gallery 2 is at http://gallery.sourceforge.net. pyrat can tell you more about it than me, i have only had a lot of experience with gallery 1

[stodge]

u often need 2 people to do the job properly.

Agree with that – I’m much stronger in graphics and design than I am at coding - Im afraid I let GO-Live do most of mine with a little tweaking.

Thanks for the link to Gallery. Looks good.

The key to good web design is the navigation - looks are always a personal thing but poor navigation such as in the BOF site is normally associated with poor initial design and planning - the main thing to get right.
Doesn’t matter how flashy the graphics are if you cant find what you want......
On the other hand we also need good looking modern sites to help attract that huge hole developing in our membership (25-35yrs).

Looks like Id better get G to give me a hand with the PHP

[Little Rob]

From my point of view Stodge please please don't copy the look of the SO website. I quite like the current look of chasers site but also agree we need to try to do something to attract new people. I haven't had time to look at the content of the SO site and am not slating it (before their members try to kill me!)
Things I'd like from a website: good gallery, something which shows maps from recent events with courses and routes on and a forum. Undersatnd people saying a forum might split older and younger club members but I think its a must as would allow lifts to events and training to be arranged. This would be especially advantagous to new members, students and juniors and would perhaps get them into the proper sport of orienteering and keep them there. Perhaps you could create it as a members only area.

[chrisecurtis]

i just mean that there are many people that are very very gifted in coding or whatever, and therefore think that they can design a site, which many cant. u often need 2 people to do the job properly.

I agree. The internet is full of awful design for that very reason, as well as the fact that it is different to other media, so it is taking a while for the real creative geniuses to emerge and lay down the "rules" about what works for the rest of us.

the thing is, while you are building a site for your members, you are also building it for prospective members. you need to be seen on a level with all the other local clubs in other sports.

I agree with this too. The traditional way of responding to these two very different audiences is to make a distinction between the "top layer" of the site which is what is seen first and where you end up if you dig a bit deeper, but as has already been said, the regular visitors need to find what they are looking for without too much digging too.

One feature of the SO site (and others that look similar) is that they are driven by a "content management system". Although cms can make a site look very bland as pages are generated from a strict template, they certainly do increase the amount of content generated, and the number of people who can be involved in creating it (because you do not need any technical knowledge to be able to publish stuff). This makes a site much more likely to be updated so fresh and worth re-visiting and much less reliant on one or two people, so more likely to be there in the future.