Golf stat tracker website

jebuz

Hi guys, regular reader of the forum and looking for some feedback on a little project I'm working on...

Bit of background first, having recently gotten bitten by the golf bug (played on and off for years), I joined a club this summer and have been playing mostly twice a week. I was told by a few people if you want to really improve, you should track your game and analyse the different areas, find out the weak spots and work on them.

I took a look at some of the golf tracker websites and signed up but was very disappointed with the selection. I found with a lot of the sites that navigation was poor, most were crammed with too much advertising and they were simply not easy to use for the average user. The technology used on a lot of sites seems to be quite dated, this impacts the site performance and diminishes the overall user experience.

I decided to have a go at developing my own solution with the aim of making it as easy as possible to enter a round and track your stats. I started about 4 months ago and It's going pretty well so far. I do plan on releasing it to the public at some stage, initially geared for the Irish market.

I'm now at a stage where the following is available:
- User registration/Login
- Edit profile, set handicap, view handicap history, set home course, other profile info
- Select your favourite courses and view general stats for each, e.g avg birdies per round
- Ability to add a new course to the system and enter tee box data.
- Enter a round
- View all rounds and statistics for each

What's remaining and is probably the biggest hurdle, is calculating overall statistics and displaying them in a friendly format to the user, before I lash into that I want to spend a bit of time doing some research on what the users will want.

I also plan on implementing a basic social networking aspect where you can befriend other members, view their stats and compare with your own.

What I'm looking for here is an idea of what kind of statistics people would be interested in and any other features that would be useful to improve your game.

I'd like to trial the system to a few people when it's stable enough so if anybody is interested let me know I'll set you up when the time comes.

I've just attached a few screenshots of the progress, the design is not final by any means, either is the name, that logo was whipped up just for demo purposes.

Thanks in advance!

Conor.

MiniGolf

Looks very interesting! You have obviously put a lot of work into it!
The stats you have used are probably about the right amount.... I am sure some of the lower guys on here will let you know if they need any others. I have the iPhone app Golfshot which tracks (if you input the data correctly!) all those stats for me but obviously not everyone has (or wants!!) an iPhone.;)
As I said in another thread I am hoping to join a club locally that has a really good practice area so stats like yours would be very useful in pinpointing where I need to practice most.
Best of luck with it and keep us updated with your progress!
MG

mag

looks good, good luck with it.
i use scoresaver myself & find it to be very good. one of the best elements of it is that it analyses the various parts of your game - fir, gir, putts, etc.. and gives you the handicap standard for each. so, for example, a 4 handicap should be averaging 62% fir, so if youre 50% itll tell you your at 12hc standard for fir and so on for each stat.
is good to see at a glance the areas where youre below standard.
its a standalone program rather than web based.

jebuz

Cheers minigolf, thanks for the positive feedback and I will indeed keep you updated.

A lot of work has gone in and I think the hardest part is probably done because I'm now at a stage where I have a system to handle and store all the data input, I just need to figure out what is the best way to display the information.

The stats I display on the rounds and courses page are very basic, so there will be a dedicated stats page where the different areas are broke down and analysed, that is putting, sand saves, fairways and gir's amongst others.

I hope to have all the GUI clubs of Ireland on the site when it goes lives, it will prove tricky attaining all the scorecards for each club but hopefully I'll get a bit of help here from different club members. It will make life a lot easier for everyone if the scorecard data is already available.

I think it could potentially evolve to be quite a powerful system once all this data is in place as I can then look into developing a mobile version where scores can be entered on the fly, you then simply log in when you come home and analyse.

Anyway all ideas and suggestions are welcome!

1916

Conor

The detail looks pretty good. Perhaps a 'golfipedia' section where users could add/edit course details, maybe a 'view from the tee' and green shot, also a mini description of playing the hole etc

1916

jebuz

Hi 1916,

Great suggestions and duly noted, I particularly like the mini description of a hole where users can offer shot saver tips or comments on the hole. The 'view from tee' image would also be nice. I know there is a guy on boards who has an extensive collections of tee images for most of the courses in Ireland, could be worth looking into. Thanks again for the comments.

Conor.

1916

Conor

I've mentioned it on here before but these guys to a very easy to understand/simple descriptor of courses. Click on 'course details' at the bottom.

If you could 'sell' your product to one course it would really assist.. damn it's hard enough to get GPS approved in competition!, but electronic scorecards is a fantastic idea, so on the fly entering rather than 5 hours later on the PC is the future, I would say

http://www.hh-gs.com/

jebuz

mag wrote: »

looks good, good luck with it.
i use scoresaver myself & find it to be very good. one of the best elements of it is that it analyses the various parts of your game - fir, gir, putts, etc.. and gives you the handicap standard for each. so, for example, a 4 handicap should be averaging 62% fir, so if youre 50% itll tell you your at 12hc standard for fir and so on for each stat.
is good to see at a glance the areas where youre below standard.
its a standalone program rather than web based.

Thanks Mag will take a look at that, I hope to be able to match any of the standalone apps in terms of stat detail and functionality with the added incentive of no software installs and access from anywhere.

jebuz

1916 wrote: »

Conor

I've mentioned it on here before but these guys to a very easy to understand/simple descriptor of courses. Click on 'course details' at the bottom.

If you could 'sell' your product to one course it would really assist.. damn it's hard enough to get GPS approved in competition!, but electronic scorecards is a fantastic idea, so on the fly entering rather than 5 hours later on the PC is the future, I would say

http://www.hh-gs.com/

I completely agree it is the future, and I believe they are already on the market in some of the more prestigious clubs, the Old Head course in Kinsale I hear used them quite recently for an event. I think they gave every team a blackberry to enter scores and there was a big scoreboard at the clubhouse with all the real-time scores on it. This is not my aim with this product but a similar approach in that you would record the scores as you go around on your mobile device, but for the purpose of recording and analyzing your game. Who knows it could be extended to work for competitions.

The traditional pen and paper approach which is what the site will initially support will be aided by the ability to print out a scorecard for your course, customized with fields for entering fairways hits, putts, GIR's etc.

Thanks for that link, those details will be mighty handy providing they are up to date and accurate.

Solarpitch

Hi jebuz,

I work as a web developer / interface designer and have experience working with systems exactly like this. One of the companies I worked for distribute and manage a system like this to clubs in the UK and Ireland.

Dispite what other's might say about mobile devices (iPhone etc) .. there absolutly key in making a product like your's work, especially for the foreseeable future.

Replicating an interface and a means of capturing data as simple as GolfShot is where it's at.

Any developer can bang together a golf tracking system and spit back some results. It's the capturing of the data in the first place and making it as effortless as possible is what makes the product effective.

Keep it simple and fast!.. The novelty of entering data tediously into a computer to get back a few stats and track record on his/her game wears off pretty quick for the general user.