3 weeks ago I officially retired from sensible, AEBBA related forum discussion. Then this gets thrown out and I find myself being unable to resist. I will therefor stick my head above the water for a little bit before crawling back under my rock where I belong! But I feel the subject merits a full discussion and requires much planning, so I will add my thoughts and hope that they are taken on board. I’ve spoken in person with Sav about some of these ideas, but some will be brand new to even you though old man! This post will be worthy of putting Mr Sheard to sleep 5 times over, but please take the time to read it as it’s taken a lot of time and thoughts on my behalf. And you wouldn’t want to Besmirch my fine efforts now would you?
I’m with Sav on this one, but at the same time not with him. I actually don’t think you can have one website to fit all our needs. I would have an AEBBA site, and a separate “Players” site (or something like that) for how to play etc. That said, in the spirit of what Sav asked, I’ve given my thoughts and present to you now my way forward…..
Firstly, any collaboration project would require a neutral webhost and with the funds coming from the AEBBA account. That way the responsibility does not rest with one person. That I would imagine will require moving hosts. Even if it does not, it may well be worth exploring anyway due to some of the facilities offered by newer services that are coming through these days.
This in turn has major benefits. Firstly, (and I speak from experience) it is easier to create something new than to modify something old if the projects aim is to give something a complete facelift. So I would strongly suggest a new site is set up and worked on whilst leaving the current site how it is. When the project is completed the domain can then be ported and the site official switched. This saves any panic and cuts down the risk of any potential lost information.
Now let’s put aside the new sites content for a moment and get a little (but not too technical). These things IMHO are what the site MUST include when thinking about the set up process.
1. Be fully Tablet/Mobile compatible
2. Be partially WYSIWYG driven with regards to design
3. Allow for external add revenue
4. Be social media friendly
The first one of these is so, so easy to ignore, but I can’t express strongly enough it’s importance. Tablets will shortly be outselling traditional laptops/desktops (please see this link www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/electronics/10305093/Tablets-forecast-to-overtake-PC-sales-at-end-of-year.html ) That’s to say nothing of the huge amount of mobile traffic which is now done on smartphones. It’s a complete certainty to say that in the long run, MORE people will be using the site on a mobile phone or tablet than they will a traditional computer. Of course all these mobile devises have full web browsers that can display any website fine (unless of course it uses Adobe Flash) but we should make it tablet friendly with regards to things like auto scaling (where the website scales to fit any size screen, Sav’s already done a good job of that with the current site) and some modern hosting solutions allow you to “Turn on” a tablet version of the site where the users experience is changed/enhanced based on whatever devise they are using. Not only that but making an actual ‘app’ of the website is not that difficult with the right hosting company. If the website is done right, it’s not TOO difficult to create an app that can be downloaded in the iPhone app store, Google play store etc which sits on the users phone and pulls news information directly from the site. That said, this is not something I’ve tried yet.
But I can’t stress enough these points. It would IMHO be a complete waste of time to just re-program the site and make it look nicer with some new things on it. We need to be forward thinking like every other organisation and look at HOW the internet is being used/will be used in the future and be prepared to enhance our users experience along with the changing face of the technological landscape. Otherwise we would be doing a whole lot of work with the end result us still being stuck in the dark ages somewhat.
Onto the other points: WYSIWYG stands for ‘What you see is what you get’. What that means in non-technical terms is that the site can be created primarily by dragging and dropping various page elements around and making it look nice and fancy without having to do any actually HTML coding. I will now refer you to this link….
barbilliards.jimdo.com/
I made this to test Jimdo’s service (the webhost/creation tool) with a very specific purpose in mind. Have a little browse around that site, especially the national tournament history page and note the following……
NO and I mean absolutely NO coding was done setting that site up.
The entire thing uses basic standard templates supplied by Jimdo and just dragging and dropping various page elements around anyway I saw fit. The tables we pretty much like doing a table in Microsoft Word. It was made using nothing but a web-browser, no software at all on my computer was used (well apart from the banner I made in Photoshop and the Map button.) The benefits of using such a design solution for our community are large. Firstly we are not reliant of a few technical experts, secondly, nobody needs to own or be able to use any specialist software and thirdly it allows us to get the coding out of the way and focus on HOW the site looks, rather than just making sure it’s functional.
I would like to add I’m not advocating this particular service I used, but rather the type of service they provide. Some in depth research and testing would be of benefit here. The company has to be well established though; as if it goes under we would be caught with our pants down….one big drawback that must be considered! Maybe the traditional “create on your computer and upload” would be a safer option. That’s why discussion on this issue is important.
With regards to the ad-revenue. If you’re going to get thousands of hits to a site, I see no reason why they the site can’t get add revenue or some form of sponsorship. Just something to be careful about as I know certain hosting solutions only allow you to use specific things. A good example being wordpress who don’t allow something like Google Ad-Sense. Just something to be mindful of.
And lastly with regards to design, it needs to be fully social media friendly. That means supporting buttons to various social media sites, live newsfeeds (such as an embedded twitter stream) are absolutely essential in creating a modern website and more importantly enhancing its reach and functionality. I’m not going to stir up this much talked about topic again, suffice to say that anyone who thinks social media is not important with regards to this project…. Well you’re wrong. Sorry there is no debate about that. You’re just wrong. I’m happy to have that debate in a separate thread, but you’ll lose.
So that’s what the site needs to be, now I will touch a little on what should be on it.
Clearly we need to keep what is already on the AEBBA site. As an expansion of that, Tommo’s offer of researching the missing stats is a great idea. We can then present that in a professional way and forever preserve our competitions history.
I think the “How To Play” has got to be the most vital of things to work on. I’ve had this debate before so I won’t go over it again. Fortunately for all of you, I’m working on that one. It was just easier to do it rather than talk about it. So stay tuned and I’ll keep you updated throughout the year. I don’t want to give a definite deadline for personal reasons.
The Map should be given pride of place obviously, and separate people should be able to edit and update it. Not sure what the current arrangement is, but it seems to be working. So all of you that work on that…. Well done, and please do keep doing what you’re doing. In the long run, it’s probably going to be one of our most vital resources. It’s so good I’m actually quite shocked I didn’t come up with that idea myself!
I like Sav’s ideas of where to buy a table, how to recover etc. These things may be best suited to a separate site, but either way they too will be vital to preserving one of the games key assets, its tables. There is a lot of miss information out there about how to restore tables etc, and certain “professional restores” Im told don’t have a clue what they are on about. A separate site about this subject (but endorsed by the AEBBA) ends this debate and allows us to give people proper information.
Regarding our games history, well I’ve done a little research in this area, but I can find so little. I’m fed up with the most in depth history of our game being this……
www.tradgames.org.uk/games/Bar-Billiards.htm
That’s un-acceptable if we want to be taken seriously in the eyes of the public and expand our reach. I personally would like to see a nice, well presented, in depth history of our game with all the major milestones in our history presented on a lovely looking webpage, with pictures etc. In that vein, I attempted to ‘crowd-source’ this project somewhat on the forum and invite contributions from all of those who have been around long enough to know about the game. Unfortunately, a forum member who I respect told me in no uncertain terms that all this information had been researched and people shouldn’t be expected to do anymore because life’s too short, Im happy to respect that (although I’m struggling to find all this wonderful information that has already been researched), but because of it the project got killed before anyone had a chance to contribute. Now it’s just me searching around in the dark trying to extrapolate the odd sentence here and there about our history in a vein attempt to tell the world about the history of our game.
However, should anyone want to contribute, please see the following thread:
barbilliards.proboards.com/thread/16092/more-help-required-history
Now something very important…….
One thing I would like to see on this site is a news feed using a separating blogging platform (something like WordPress). Let me explain a little.
Traditionally, updating a website means to webmaster going in and making changes and this normally has to be done on a computer. However, something like WordPress (a blogging platform) is good for posting quick (or very in depth) information, and a WordPress feed could simply be embedded into the news page of the website. The benefits of this…. Massive!
Wordpress have a very capable iPhone/Android app that you can post updates from. So imagine this….. We’re all out in Jersey; I’m sitting there with my phone, and the moment Barbleman pots the last white down the hundred to win his first World Championship I can quickly type in on my iphone “breaking news, Tony Willis wins his first world championship”, press the upload to wordpress button and bingo…..
30 seconds after the match has ended, the AEBBA website has the breaking news on its news page “Tony Willis wins his first world championship”. I could even snap a quick picture and attach it to the post.
That’s what I’m talking about!
All of a sudden were in the modern era of quick, live information. It would move the website away from just being a static resource and make it something that people will want to visit regularly. Great thing about having a news feed embedded in the site, but hosted separately is that we could have a small group of “editors” who can all log in and post updates, meaning that we are not reliant on one poor soul attending every bar billiards event around the country. And this above everything else I have mentioned is so, so easy to set up, yet so, so beneficial in making us a professional and modern organisation.
Then lastly there is this forum. What a stupid idea that was! Whoever came up with it deserves to be reprimanded and held accountable for crimes against Bar Billiards. To this day it causes me nothing but pain. That said I would like it to be officially endorsed by the AEBBA and used by them as the fantastic resource it can and was meant to be. It’s our primary source of communication, and although social media will in the long run be the place for banter amongst players, it’s still and will remain the best place for serious discussions like this.
I’ve covered a lot here, and it’s difficult to take in. In truth there is not one thing that needs doing with regards to our web presence, its lots of little things, and it needs more than 1 or 2 people to get involved in. I don't think just giving the AEBBA site a facelift and putting some more info on there will do us any good whatsoever, because we need to attract NEW people to the game, and use modern day tools to EXPAND our reach. We need to make the site interactive and engaging rather than just a static resource that just looks nicer on the eye. Without these things we are just preaching the establishment. Fortunately we could all play to our strengths and have different areas in which we can contribute.
To make things easier, I have attached this PDF with my proposals laid out which should make for easier reading. It’s a blueprint of how I personally would approach this endeavour. Use it, don’t use it…. It’s completely up to you guys. But any group of people (and I’m with Sav on this, it needs to be a group) who steps up to the plate deserves great credit and support, and I personally wish you all the best, whoever they turn out to be.
And so ends my thoughts.