New Irish Athletics website

stephen gibney

www.irishathleticsdatabase.com

RayCun

interesting, but the layout is a bit odd, horizontal scrolling for the clubs is a bad idea. Maybe put them in a double row? Or a separate page for searching by club?
(and you left me out?)

stephen gibney

thanks for the feedback, have you emailed me your times/club/achievements/DOB ? (If not that is the reason you would nt be included)

rom

stephen gibney wrote: »

thanks for the feedback, have you emailed me your times/club/achievements/DOB ? (If not that is the reason you would nt be included)

It's a good idea but you probably better off using wordpress or a wiki.

pc11

Have I bumped my head and ltravelled back to 1997?

RacoonQueen

Basic website, can be improved. No need to insult the chap lads...

rom

RacoonQueen wrote: »

Basic website, can be improved. No need to insult the chap lads...

Personally I was being constructive as updating static pages will be massively time consuming.

YFlyer

McCann Power of 10

Krusty_Clown

I can't really see any appeal. As rom suggests, better to store the data in a database, and facilitate some kind of search facility. There are a number of sites that already do this very well though (example).

downthemiddle

YFlyer wrote: »

McCann Power of 10

Is that similar to McCain Power of 10?

*adopting pedant mode of some other posters on the thread

This is the first attempt at building an Irish athletics database and it is long overdue. The format obviously needs to be fine tuned but the concept is a good one. Fair play to Stephen for the work done so far and I'm sure he will take on board the advice given and look at the format.

longjump67

Two brothers have set up a ranking site for underage athletes u-12 to Junior, in it's infantcy but could be worthwhile to promote it.

http://www.arcurankings.com/index.html

plodder

I wouldn't worry about the format too much, except the the logos across the top - horizontal scrolling is a no-no. It's actually laid out well imo. Maybe, I'm just old school, but simple is good in my book. The real work with sites like this is getting the content and keeping it up to date ..

Pisco Sour

Feedback is obviously good and yes the site needs serious improving but it's only in it's infancy. However, rather than come up with sly digs at it why don't you all send this guy your PBs so he can build a meaningful database. Something so small but positive like that would help this site greatly I'm sure. As far as I'm aware, this site is not just for the elite, but the general athletics community, otherwise I wouldn't have received a facebook mail asking for my times.

People forget that sites like these are done by people voluntarily and for nothing more than the pure love of the sport.

YFlyer

downthemiddle wrote: »

Is that similar to McCain Power of 10?

*adopting pedant mode of some other posters on the thread

This is the first attempt at building an Irish athletics database and it is long overdue. The format obviously needs to be fine tuned but the concept is a good one. Fair play to Stephen for the work done so far and I'm sure he will take on board the advice given and look at the format.

There are a number of sites that Stephen, and whoever else, can use to gather data and get additional ideas.

Be nice to include the years of the athletes PBs.

rom

Why not contact power of 10 guys and ask them about the possibility of making an Irish one also ? At the end of the day they have all the work done on the backend and OP & co can then concentrate in inputing the data. No reason to reinvent the wheel*.

* even if it's deep fried.

longjump67

rom wrote: »

Why not contact power of 10 guys and ask them about the possibility of making an Irish one also ? At the end of the day they have all the work done on the backend and OP & co can then concentrate in inputing the data. No reason to reinvent the wheel*.

* even if it's deep fried.

You can log on to the power of ten site and you will be listed however as a non-british resident and you will not have an official UK ranking. You will be listed at the bottom of the rankings but you can compare your times, distances, heights etcc with the best in the UK.

Krusty_Clown

Constructive feedback is more useful than a pat on the back. The site will have a better chance of survival, if it offers something unique and of value, and does so in a manner that is user-friendly. If you fix things at the design stage, the implementation cost (effort) is greatly reduced.

Some of the key points:

• Avoid side-scrolling menus. It is painful now, but there are over 280 athletics clubs in Ireland, so if the site starts to grow, it will become unusable in the current format.
  
• Avoid static pages. Every time JO'S knocks a 1/100th of a second off his 400m PB, it will mean manually editing a HTML page to update the statistics. Also, because the entire site is built on static HTML pages, any time you add a new athlete you need to manually edit the front page, manually update a number of links across the site, and manually create and deploy a new HTML page. Too much work. There are open-source CMS packages and sites that do all of this work for you, like Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress etc. Eliminate the work. Start researching them now.
• Search facility: If you are extremely successful in your website venture, you could have between 1k and 30k athletes referenced on your site. Users will not be able to find the information they need, without a search facility. You don't need to write this functionality yourself. If you implement the site using a CMS, search is typically one of the included pieces of functionality.
  
• Database driven: The value of the site is the data (and the relevance of the data). Unless you store this data in a database, the effort involved in maintaining it, will be too great. Also, storing the data in a DB will also allow you to produce useful and meaningful reports, like general improvements across specific distances/events, age based progress/dis-improvement etc.
• Usability: You want site visitors to remember the site, bookmark it and return. First impressions are everything. Needs a dramatic face-lift, or else, the data better be so damn good, that visitors will put up with the existing aesthetics to get the data that they need.

Best of luck with the site. I hope it is successful.

Timmaay

1stly well done on the effort, I'll agree fully with KC however, to have any hope of succeeding I'd recommend that you go down the database driven route also! Easier said than done I'll fully admit, and you would need to be able to code in some computer language other than just HTML that can do databases (likes of Mysql/PHP etc). What I'd personally suggest is you go abegging for help from people who designed some of the existing Irish results websites, two that are very well developed are http://www.imra.ie (which was developed by vision1 ) and http://results.iuaa.org (developed by sindar.net). I'll admit to develop such a website would generally cost 1000s, but considering how this would benefit Irish Athletics, and the possible advertising revenue etc it can certainly be made work!

rom

Find out which of Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal etc support CRUD applications. Let the CMS manage the menu's etc and spend the time in developing the CRUD application to input and display your data.