Website Report

Well… I survived the somewhat traumatic early part of the year and am here to tell the tale.  Not content with booking myself in for shoulder surgery in March, I then discovered to my horror (and with no warning) that our web hosts Lycos had gone bust and our website was no longer functioning!!!!  Many thanks to all those who soon told me and apologies if I got a bit short with the 10^th, 11^th, 12^th, …… of you who did so – you can imagine it was a bit stressful and even my normal calm(!?) manner didn’t cope too well.  Thankfully all was resolved eventually and we now use Pickaweb as our co-hosts along with the continuing use of Teamopolis to provide the useful calendar and forum features.

This time last year I reported that we hoped to add some kind of e-mail notification for gala selections, so the Team Manager can easily let everyone know they are selected and also send out reminders to those who haven’t indicated their availability.  I am glad to report this was successfully implemented – as many of you will have already discovered.  The facility does of course rely on you checking your e-mails and on us having up-to-date details of the addresses you actually use.  Please let the Membership Secretary know if you change e-mail address at any time.

In previous years I have included some statistics on website usage in my report, but since we effectively had 3 providers this year, the Lycos usage figures aren’t available and the Teamopolis ones are not easy to get hold of I have decided to dispense with them.  The purpose in the past was to indicate the upward trend of the website usage and I feel now that we have reached a maturity level where the site is regularly used by a fair proportion of our membership and significant growth of that usage is unlikely.  By way of an anecdote on the site usage, I was pleasantly surprised when Emily Raw recently told me she had been ‘Googling’ for some information on the ASA Laws for stroke technique for her ‘A’ level PE course and the BASC website had shown up in the list  - so she used it. It’s good to know we are helping with our members’ academic studies as well as their swimming education.

The eagle-eyed amongst you may notice that the final 2 paragraphs below are virtually identical to last years report.  I make no apologies for this, since they contain important messages and of course we have many new members who have not necessarily seen them before.

The club website continues to be an important (and often the primary) means of communicating information to all our members on a variety of topics. In particular, we make use of the splash page for important news items which often need to be relayed at short notice (e.g. pool closure causing cancellation of swim sessions – very topical recently) so we would encourage you to visit on a regular basis (even daily) to keep abreast of what is going on. These important notices don’t require you to have a login, but you do need one to access the forums, gala results, PB records etc. If you don’t already have access to the members areas, fill in the form on the website by following the ‘Password’ link on the left hand side of the site.

If you have ideas on what you would like to see on the site and how we can improve it to suit the needs of Club members, please let me know – after all it’s your club. You can send me an e-mail at webmaster@busheyasc.org  or talk to me at any of the club sessions.

 

 

Kevin Binns

BASC Webmaster