JackL's Blog: How to run on the Information Superhighway without fear

How to run on the Information Superhighway without fear

Screenshot of Benfleet Running Club homepage

I’ve been looking at Running Club websites in Essex with my usual jaundiced eye ;-). In fact it came about due to a recent cross–country run in Hadleigh that my club was organising (I was a marshal). It was a good day and the opposing teams had plenty of competitive spirit, so (being a web geek) I thought I’d take a look at their clubs website to see if they had what it takes on–line as well as off–road.

“You can’t expect them to be professional”, after all it is amateur athletics!

After Googling the clubs I realised that I needed a few more to get a better representation (for statistical purposes). So I’ve decided to list the Top 20 running club sites in the area instead.

I’ll admit to being a bit anal when it comes to website standards and all of the forthcoming comments shouldn’t be taken as personal slights to any of the webmasters involved.

If you’re involved in one of the sites below why not give your opinion of the others!

Essex Running Club Website Top 20

So, in alphabetical order…

If you’re wondering about Ford Fitness (one of the cross–country teams), I couldn’t find their website.

Geeky facts

Content

40% hadn’t been updated in over a month.
25% have a forum (60% of which were built into the site).
5% (i.e. one site) used a sophisticated Content Management System (this allows select members to easily add content directly to the site).
25% had a page for the club rules/constitution.

Design

40% are designed using software other than MS FrontPage!
90% are readable in both Internet Explorer and Firefox.
70% could be resized to 800×600 without making the visitor scroll horizontally.
Only 10% were w3c standards compliant (or at least had a DOC-TYPE).

Misc

Only 35% of the sites have a .org.uk domain name.
This is the recommended generic top–level domain and country code for a non–commerical organisation in the UK.
10% didn’t have a dedicated domain name at all.
30% take longer than 8 seconds to load the home page on a 128Kb ISDN line (this is a good average speed between dial–up and a broadband connection).
8 seconds is the maximum most people will wait for a new page to load.

iThoughts

What I liked was the fact that they were all very different designs (granted some are more usable than others) — they didn’t use some MS FrontPage template and leave it at that!

Some of the graphics used in these sites are truly awful. It reminds me of the early days of DTP when everyone used as many fonts as they could on one page. Suffice to say if your site resembles (even in part) the Borat site (which is deliberately bad) then seek advice from a professional.

And finally a few tips for what they’re worth:

Most running clubs have a fair few members — to get that team spirit on–line you should, at the very least, get a forum. Better still get a CMS.
Design the site with a purpose in mind. Be it to gain new members, inform current members or issue result listings, all of these idea’s require a bit of thought before publishing to the web.
When you’ve finished your masterpiece get a few people to review it (preferably ones that will tell you the truth).
Remember, the Internet doesn’t stop moving, try to keep up.

Isn't this del.icio.us?

Posted on 14/12/06 05:30 PM by Jack Large

Thanks for you email and web observations. I agree with all your comments. When we looked at building the new site we certainly came to the same conclusions. The new site is still evolving, so hope to make some improvements soon, but I did tell my friend, who designed and built it that it must be ready by the agm ! so he did it all from scratch in 2 weeks and my brief wasn’t the clearest.

Cheers

Mike

mike | Dec 18, 08:34 AM | #

Mike,

Thanks for your reply. Castlepoint Joggers was, IMHO, one of the best graphically designed sites and for a two week turn–around very impressive! By my nature I’m more into the code, accessibility and usability of the web than the ‘pretty pictures’ but I like to think I can appreciate good design.

JackL.

JackL | Dec 19, 11:52 AM | #

Interesting blog, nice to see someone is taking the time to visit the websites. I suppose the reason why most of our sites are fairly basic, is down to time and money. I try to keep ours up to date, but struggle sometimes with all the other work and home commitments I have and of course finding time to do some running too! :o)

I’m totally new to this website building; don’t have a computer head on me so have done the best I can without getting costly advice or outsourcing.

But since we started the website earlier this year, we have recruited a lot of new members through the internet. So for us it has been a success. The only regrets we have are that we didn’t do it sooner.

I’m always looking for ways to improve the site, so changes are always happening and I do like the idea of a forum.

I definitely think all running clubs should have a website no matter how basic they are!

Keep a look out for future improvements

Vicki | Dec 20, 07:27 PM | #

Vicki,

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Understand your point of view regarding time and budget constraints.

One of the benefits of a CMS is that you can let other members of the club help update the site without the layout being disturbed.

You can get very impressive, free Content Management Systems (CMS) but it does need to have hosting (the webspace you use to store the pages) with particular features to work.

If you aren’t very geeky then it would be a bit of a trial to get one installed on your hosting. A simpler method to get more up to date content might be to use a free, managed forum (see the Benfleet RC Forum for an example).

JackL.

JackL | Dec 21, 12:05 AM | #

Web sites are as good as the frequency with which they are updated. Once members begin to rely on the content being uptodate then you must check it almost every day. Websites also generate many e-mails. For every webmaster there is a webmaster widow.

Sue Fuller | Dec 28, 12:21 PM | #

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