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* CONTENT
Content is the reason why users come to a website. In order to maintain
the traffic and the repeat visits to a site the content needs to be
interesting and fresh. Wolves.co.uk aims to provide 3 or 4 new news
stories every day. Stories are issued early in the morning to catch the
peak of users at around 9 o clock, and then again at lunchtime to appeal
to the people who log on in the lunch hour.
The news articles are the most
visited pages of Wolves.co.uk. Sports
fans are very eager for news, information and images of the team that they
support and the content must reflect this.
It is also important to be the authoritative source of news
information and all new stories are broken first on the official Wolves website.
Content creation and maintenance at Wolves is a full time job, demanding a
journalist to be present at all matches and in addition sourcing and
writing stories and features from around the club.
It is also a skilled job as the writer needs to create stories from
scratch and look for interesting features and ideas.
In order to ensure that the site
always contains fresh and relevant content a set of minimum content
requirements have been implemented>
The minimum content requirements that the site operates are as
follows:
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Section Title
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Content Requirement
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Breaking News
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12 new club stories per
week. These must
include pre match managers interview published no later than 2 hours
before kick off and a post match interview with a key player for
every match
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Player feature:
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2 interviews per week that
must be either a question and answer session or an interview with a
featured player
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Pre Match analysis
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A pre match analysis must be
posted on match day at least 45 minutes prior to kick off. This must include the starting line up of the team
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Match report
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A full report on the match action which must be posted within 3 hours of the end of the match
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What the papers say
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This is a feature which
collates all the Wolves coverage from the press.
There must be one piece per week.
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Ticket information
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Comprehensive ticket
information including pricing
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Player profiles
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Detailed articles providing
information about players. The
requirement is to have player profiles for all the current squad
including pictures
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Main Club Feature
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A feature about an aspect of
Wolves
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Content for Wolves is managed by a
content management system that ensures that content is easier to maintain.
and more information can be found in our Content Management Section below
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* HEADLINE NEWS FEEDS
Unfortunately few smaller sites /
businesses can afford the manpower to keep placing such large volumes of
fresh information.
One way of keeping your site
fresh is to have the latest headlines on your subject always
displayed. This would appear a very time consuming process but
companies are falling over themselves to provide you with news feeds on
any selected subject under the sun (well not quite - I cannot get one
on umpiring but I can get one on cricket - which is nearly as
good)
Try our own news headlines an automatic feed on cricket -
free from www.moreover.com who supply a complete range
of news feeds - you select the topic, register with their site and they
will supply you with a slab of HTML to paste on to your site - and then
you can forget it!!!
Other providers include: --
Future
Publishing
http://news-4-u.com-:- News,
weather, sports, business, finance, entertainment, health, travel,
horoscope, tech, foods and more
http://www.newsclipper.com ~ Snip and Ship Dynamic News
Content to Your Web Pages -:- News Clipper is an application which allows
you to integrate information from around the internet into your own
personal web page - in your own personal style.
http://www.thunderstone.com an
independent R&D company that has been providing high-performance
state-of-the-art solutions to intelligent information retrieval and
management problems for over 19 years.
For those prepared to pay substantial sums, feeds can be obtained from
Reuters, FT, Butterworths and several others
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* CONTENT
MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
Once your site grows, you will need some system to manage
all your content, controlling the style and content from several authors
with a formal approval process and an obsolescence procedure.
Some of the sophisticated ones are capable of extracting information from
other sites automatically without the co-operation, knowledge or consent
of the original authors.
This is generally beyond the scope of this treatise but consideration
should be given to www.liveinfo.co.uk
, a local (Stoke) software house, Autonomy, Lionbridge and others
Wolves.co.uk is part of a consortium of websites made
up of most of the football clubs in the Nationwide Leagues.
The consortium (known as FLPTV) uses a content management system to
provide content templates to all clubs so that each individual club can
personalize their site using their own content and graphics but can
benefit from the centrally organized content that is provided.
Centrally organized content is usually information feeds like football
fixtures, results and statistics.
The benefit of central content is that it is created
once and then distributed to all clubs, and provides an accurate and
timely source that would be labour-intensive to produce on an individual
basis. However relatively few organisations can take advantage
of such facilities, although some companies such as UK
Villages are offering it as part of their portal service - see below
For the general business, there is a wide range of content
management software providers and a useful article that discusses their
relative merits is
Product Review: Content Management Solutions - Doculabs takes a hard look
at content-management solutions from 14 vendors and tells you which ones
it thinks are best.VAR business, Sept 3, 2001 p41
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* SEARCH MY SITE - INTERNAL SEARCHES
One of the problems that we have
encountered on visiting other sites is that the navigation is not always
obvious to get to the solution that you require. I believe
that every site should have an internal search engine so that any visitor
can easily enter a word that they expect to appear and immediately see
possible answers displayed.
Acumen Books and Audley Net use www.atomz.com and
this has the added benefit of giving the webmaster a weekly report of what people
have been looking for (often reveals how ignorant they are about using
searches - last week someone asked for "available accommodation in Knutton"
Click here for site search of neighbouring
pages as an example. www.atomz.com supply
you with a small section of HTML code to cut and paste into your own
site.
http://www.searchuk.com offer
"Searchengine.com (UK) - a leading provider of fully managed, hosted
search for your web site, vortal or portal. Using our proprietary
technology you can set-up your own search engine in a matter of minutes,
enabling your client to quickly find what they want"
http://www.searchengines.net offer to "Spice up your site with a
free search engine. Choose from the hundreds of search engines available,
and add one to your site today."
http://www.freefind.com offer " Free search engine for
your web site. FreeFind.com lets your visitors search your web site. Add
a search engine to your web site today, for free, in less than ten
minutes. This is the fastest and easiest way to add professional level searching
to a website"
www.fusion.bot last in our list but
by no means least!
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* CREATING AN ONLINE COMMUNITY
"Online communities attract traffic to a website, promote electronic
commerce and foster ideas" Community is a commodity. Jim
Cashel.
Newmedia, August 1999 v9 i8 p38(6)
The creation of an online community is a goal to which many website owners
aspire. Sports fans are a good example of an offline community that can
translate online if the site owner can provide the tools to facilitate
that community. If the website user is engaged then they are more likely
to return to the site. One of the ways in which a user can be engaged is
by feeling that they are part of an online community.
There is plenty of on line help for individuals and organizations
wanting to create an online community. Sports sites are excellent places
to create online communities because sports fans view themselves naturally
as part of a community of like minded individuals.
Features of online communities include group communication tools,
newsletters, online discussion forums and group calendars.
The following sites provide information and advice on the subject of
creating an online community:
Commercial sites:
http://www.domeus.co.uk
Non profit making sites:
http://www.makingthenetwork.org
http://www.Techsoup.org
The tools that most websites seem to use to build an online community
are
Message Boards (also known as Bulletin
Boards)
Chat Rooms
Online Auctions
Email newsletters
It is possible to download software to create all the functionality
above for free from http://www.Multicity.com
who specialize in providing software for online communities, and
the site is totally dedicated to software for this purpose. Multicity also
provide translation software to enable communities to be built in more
than one language. Multicity also widely promote the advantages to the
website owner of creating an online community.
http://www.Download.com
http://www.Tucows.com
These two sites provide software . freeware, adware
and shareware - for a wide range of businesses and
organizations.
Some specialist community portals have been set up such as www.UKVillages.co.uk
http://www.citynetguide.co.uk/,
http://any-village.co.uk www.thisisstaffordshire.co.uk
who have set up "beehive" but again maintenance of their own
village material by local
webmasters is somewhat cumbersome.
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* E-MAILING LISTS
Probably the most effective tool is the mailing list. This
enables you to send stimulating material to potential customers reminding
them of your existence and offering incentives to re-visit your site - but
it is not our task here to advise on content. Nor do we have sufficient
expertise on the best methods for collecting the email addresses.
DO be
careful of the Data Protection Act 1998 in UK.
There is a wide range of software available, some free and
some expensive - and the cost does not always reflect the facilities. Many
of the free ones are financed by adverts that they attach to the outgoing
emails. There are several factors to consider.
Firstly where is the database to be held (a) on your own isolated
system (b) on your own web server (c) on your ISP. s server or (d)
on some third party hosting service.
Secondly how much control you want over the
data.
One of the leading and cheap services was www.listbot.com but this was recently
taken over by Microsoft under their www.bcentral.com banner and this has
now become more complex and more expensive. Both systems allowed the list
owner the ability to add or delete email addresses but no detail amendment
nor do they allow the owner to restore an address that has been deleted by
the owner. Under the bCentral system, the recipient has the ability to
choose from a selection of optional lists and our experience is that they
do not always select the options sensibly and it is most frustrating that
the owner is unable to correct them. You should also check how it handles
"bounces".
Thirdly, do you want the service to retain an archive of
old newsletters and the ability for subscribers to retrieve
them?
Most services allow the owner to place code on his website
and also in his emails to enable readers to subscribe with little effort.
Some services also offer code that enable a subscriber to pass a copy to
his friends (?) with a suggestion that they also subscribe.
Lycos also offer a comprehensive community service very
similar to bCentral. Other popular services are offered by ListProc ( http://www.cren.net/listproc/index.html
), ListServ ( http://www.lsoft.com/products/listserv.asp
), MajorDomo ( ), Max e-Mailer ( www.ismax.com ) often with a "lite",
demonstration or shareware facility as well as more sophisticated
facilities at an increasing cost.
We also found that Jim Daniels of JDD Publishing ( http://bizweb2000.com ) has
evaluated:
MailLoop This is
a great program for managing an email list. It allows you to filter email
addresses from text files, purge duplicates, combine lists and automate
just about every other task necessary to run an opt-in list through your
own server. It is a bit pricey, but when used effectively it can save you
quite a bit of money in the long-run.
SubscribeMe
is a cgi script that can handle your subscribe and unsubscribe requests as
well as automating maintenance and delivery. A popular script among
do-it-yourself e-zine publishers.
CoolList
will host your mailing list for free. In exchange, they put a small,
3-line ad at the end of each message that gets mailed out.
Topica is a
popular choice among marketers on a tight budget. Topica will host your
mailing list for free. They offer an ad network which places small ads in
your mailings.
SparkList
An excellent list host and the one I use for delivering my BizWeb
Gazette. This company offers a hybrid web interface for simplifying your
list management. Very fast servers, competitive pricing and excellent
support.
WebBusinessWizard
Low cost opt-in list and e-database builder. Simple interface to
build sign up forms and do broadcast mailings. Also includes a powerful
shopping cart.
Lyris is a software program
for hosting Internet email mailing lists, such as open discussions,
moderated forums, announcement lists and auto-responders. They offer
software to do it yourself or you can hire them to run your
list.
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| * CHAT
ROOMS
This is a real time extension of Bulletin Boards
(covered in more detail below) but one special example is:
Celebrity Chat
Many sports sites use celebrity chat sessions as a way of driving
traffic to the site and encouraging longer visits. Celebrity sessions are
usually timed at a peak period and advertised and promoted well before the
event. Many celebrities will offer question and answer sessions.
Live television programmes (e.g. professional
football matches) are now encouraging fans watching the game to email
their views for ‘half-time’ discussion, and to dis/agree with the
Experts’ decision on the ‘man of the match’ at the end. Appropriate advertisements are used when fans do use
this facility.
A useful article discussing the software available to build a message
board or chat room is:
Communicating . Building a community can be one of the biggest boosts to
your site's stickiness. Troy Dreier PC Magazine, Feb 20 2001 p133
Message Board and Chat room software is available at
http://www.infopop.com
UltimateBulletinBoard and OpenTopic provide message board
functionality
http://www.Multicity.com
Minicity software now available for smaller sites
Multicity also enables translation for boards with non-English
writers
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| * BULLETIN BOARDS/
MESSAGE BOARDS have been partially covered
immediately above as part of "Community"
Many sports sites provide message boards to allow their supporters the opportunity to
share conversation with other fans. From the site owners point of
view, this means that the site's stickiness can be increased as the
visitors will come back more frequently to view other contributions,
and to add new points of their own. Sport is a topic that many want
to discuss, irrespective of time and location and therefore a message
board is usually a prime feature of a sports site.
These are very useful even in their simplest form
to ‘list’ events, and therefore provide bare details, the ‘facts’
people need to know. In
a clear, summary form, where a quick look to check a fact ( date, time,
meeting place) is required, these are very useful, and cut out the
‘noise’. Obviously
they need to be kept well up to date and old material cleared off as soon
as it is ‘out of date’.
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| * DISCUSSION GROUPS
have been covered above as part of "Community" but if you
want to run a standalone discussion group then www.delphi.com
is worth a visit.
Closed groups can benefit from online
communication being able to access information about the Group, its’
future activities, officers elected, Officers addresses, and decisions
(to be) taken.
Good examples are the BMW Motorcycle Club and the
amateur dramatic society Stafford Players (www.bmw.co.uk
and www.staffordplayers.com).
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| * GUEST BOOKS
A Guest book is a designated area in a website where a user can sign in
and make comments on the site.
The Guest Book list of email addresses
then form the basis of an email list for the website owner.
Sometimes, the entries in the Guest Book can form an
interesting feature for the site as they can be informative and amusing
entries.
BEWARE that you need to monitor it
regularly for two reasons, firstly to answer any questions raised but
recently there have been a rash of "junk" postings trying to get viewers
to visit porn and other irrelevant sites.
BE AWARE of Data Protection Act when
adding these names to your mailing list and also be careful that strangers
cannot easily obtain these email addresses.
Relevant articles:
Community is a commodity. Jim
Cashel.
Newmedia, August 1999 v9 i8 p38(6)
Be My guest. Mike Espindle
Home Office Computing, October 1998 v16 n10 p107(2)
Free software at:
http://www.hits4me.com
Examples of Guest Books in operation:
http://www.cricketumpire.net
who use
www.theGuestBook.com
http://www.turnhome.demon.co.uk who use software sourced
from www.freenetname.co.uk (The
website for the Northern League football clubs)
http://www.audley.net who use http://members.tripod.co.uk/
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| * DIARY
A diary of forthcoming events, not just your own but anything else
that may be of interest to your community is another good way of
attracting people back to your site.- BUT the biggest problem is
getting people / organisations to feed you information in the
first place to constantly up to date.. If it is not,
return visits will soon dry up; old news is no news! Obsolescence is fairly simple to handle -
repetitive events, especially "last Friday in Month" are
difficult to handle.
A good illustration of these problems can be found at www.audley.net
click on Diary of Events - similarly with www.DMSL.net
- even worse is www.acumenbooks.co.uk/courses.htm
The main ‘control’ can easily be something as
straightforward as MS Outlook, where bare details of events can be
held, a check can be kept on what has passed, what is to come. This
can be used to then expand the site with bigger, more attractive
adverts for the forthcoming event. So far, we have only discovered manual methods of maintenance
although perhaps a small database with ASP code might
help. We would welcome suggestions from people who have
found a solution.
More time
can be usefully used to create complex structures and controls, with
such as MFCActiveX ControlWizard, but equally a simpler method of creating ads for future
events could be with scanned images/logos and text in Word, or the use
of Powerpoint to create the whole ad, importing it into the web site
in block.
Several of the Community sites do offer such facilities but most of
them are very cumbersome to update.
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| * LINKS to OTHER SITES
Reciprocal links are a good way of obtaining visitors
initially. It can also be a good way of attracting them
back if you provide a "portal" to other information that
your visitors may need in the future. For example http://www.cricketumpire.net
endeavours to keep links to every other site that mentions cricket
umpires in a significant way.
So far, we have only discovered manual methods - by doing frequent
sweeps of search engines and following links to links to
links. There is also the problem of checking links remain
current. We would welcome suggestions from people who have
found a solution.
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| * DIRECTORY of
useful related information
Yet another way of getting visitors to come back to "enquire
within upon everything" (I guess that copyright in that phrase
must have expired by now). This has proved very useful and
easier to maintain than some other ideas.
Several of the companies such as http://www.multimap.com
allow reciprocal links - this may bring users to your site to look at
your map and then look at geographically neighbouring sites and vice
versa.
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| * ALIAS ADDRESSES
Another feature that has had a reasonable take up has
been offering the service of an "alias" address - such as Colin
Pearson@CricketUmpire.net. This is not a real email
address (although some large businesses could offer that as well) but
it enables the user to express his loyalty and identity rather than
hiding behind pn916369 (or whatever). We use the www.entweb.co.ukservice
at a cost of around £25 per annum to give this facility free to any
of our customers.
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| * OTHER INTERESTING FEATURES:
There are other
features that are available on line as shareware or adware that can be
incorporated into a sports site to enhance its interest to users.
Since
sports performance is closely linked to the weather it might be of
interest to incorporate an item of weather software. Free software at: http://www.Tucows.com
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| * COUNTERS
Obviously the webmaster needs to obtain visitor statistics but
these should not be open to the world at large!
Many sites feature these prominently but would you really admit to having less than
1,000 visitors when you start it?
Do you really want the competition to know how well / badly you are
doing?
It is also reported that your count may be inflated by Robot Spiders
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| * HYGIENE FACTORS
Obviously you should obey certain "hygiene" rules so that
you do not frighten visitors off during their first visit.
These have been covered in depth in many other places but it is worth
reminding the reader of a few rules:
include contact information (not just email address but
physical address, phone number, real identity - unless you intend to
be criminal).
check on general usability (possibly even friendliness to disabled
visitors)
check load
time through a dial up connection
PROMOTIONAL FACTORS
We have had some success with www.selfpromote.com
, banners, street maps submission to search engines and directories etc
STATISTICS
Ken feels that it important to continually monitor the number
of visitors even though that does not correlate to stickiness of a
site (unless anyone can suggest a statistical means of accurately
measuring return visitors).
Using the figures over a period of time in a simple
spreadsheet can show trends, graphically, to see how visiting is
progressing. Action to address downward trends can hopefully
then be taken. Ignorance is NOT bliss!.
If your site is of a specialist nature, serves a
‘community’, you may well be very successful and satisfied with a
lower number of visitors than Wolves F C. Obviously the
economics of maintaining the site, both in terms of time and money,
must be judged in this light.
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