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| SOFTBALL LINKS |
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Softball Online
by Dave
Monday, March 13, 2006
So you've already got a softball organization or team and you think it's time to create an "online presence" or in other words, you want to make a web site. The internet is a wondrous thing. It's a great way to communicate to members of your existing organization. It is also a great way to promote your organization to people who might be interested in it. But before you go start a site, there are a number of considerations to be addressed. What platform should you use? Why are you doing this? How much effort is involved? How frequently will you be able to update it? What should you include? How will you get the right people to your site? These are just a few of the questions you need to ask yourself. Here are my thoughts on the subject.
What Are Your ObjectivesThe single most important question you must ask yourself before you go about creating a softball organization web site is what your objectives are. The answers to almost every other question you can possibly ask will flow from your answer to this one. Your objectives will control whether or not you bother with creating a site, assuming you decide you do, what platform you will use and what you will include.
Perhaps you just want a way to communicate with the twelve members of your team. So what's wrong with e-mail? If all you really need to do is send out periodic e-mails, I suggest you either use your existing e-mail account, or if things are slightly more complex, try creating a closed group via Yahoo groups which will still alow you to share things like photographs and other files like a centralized calendar. If your needs exceed these, maybe a web site is going to be the answer.
The best reason I can think of for creating a web site rather than using simple e-mails or creating a group is because your list of users exceeds a reasonable number of people. Even more to the point, if your list of users includes those not currently within your organization - if you want to use it to recruit - then probably a web site is a better option. A web site is a great way to announce sign-ups and tryouts to the community provided that people can find your site but we'll get to the later. But to go back a bit, if all you want to do is announce team game or practice schedules, or to inform folks about rainouts, etc., a web site is not the most effective means. And if you do plan to use a site for these things, you had better be prepared to up date the site quickly whenever eventualities like rainouts occur.
If your goal is to provide information to the general public about when your organization is going to hold signups or tryouts, make sure that you keep it up to date. There is nothing more frustrating than searching high and low to find a travel team then visiting the team's site to learn that tryouts are to be held Saturday September 5, 1996. If you've held tryouts for the coming year and don't anticipate holding additional ones for nine months, say that on your site. Give every visitor to your site something they can take away with them even if that is only the knowledge that they checked too late for the current year. They just may write themselves a note to check the site in August to see when your tryouts will be for next year.
If the goal of building and maintaining a web site for your softball organization is to perform fundraising activities, I advise you to find another vehicle. Web sites are great for organizations like the Salvation Army or American Red Cross but if you see even a penny of funds come into your organization via the web, it will be just pennies. You are not going to raise $5,000 for a big, out-of-town tournament via the internet. It just isn't going to happen.
As in all other endeavors, you must first examine your objectives before you take any step. Knowing your objectives will provide the answer to all the other questions.
Choosing A PlatformThe first question you need to ask yourself after you have decided to start a site is what platform are you going to use to create and managae it. Can you build a site from scratch? Can you write HTML or do you know how to use tools which will write the code for you and otherwise help you program your site? If you don't know how to write code and you are completely unfamiliar with the WYSIWYG tools like "Dreamweaver," forget about learning it on the fly. You don't have the time. It isn't that it is so difficult to learn. It's just that it does take some effort and your time is better spent doing other things.
There are online tools out there which can help you create and manage a complex web site with all the bells and whistles. These include Eteamz and League Lineup which are sophisticated, partially free, sites which provide web space and myriad tools supporting most of the fastpitch softball sites on the web. From 40,000 feet, they look really good to me but something makes me suspicious about whether they are really the easiest way to go about things. For one thing, most of the team sites out there are never updated. If it were easy to do, you would think they'd be updated all the time. For another thing, with all the features and tools these outfits offer, you would expect teams to use them. By and large they don't. If you spend an hour on Eteamz and click through to the calendars, message boards, etc., you will find that most organizations never use the things. I've never been on Eteamz as a site administrator but my instincts tell me that these easy-to-use tools just aren't. Fortunately there is another very easy-to-use option.
Google owns a web site you have undoubtedly heard about in the news. It is called Blogger.com which is basically a tool for people the news media refers to as "bloggers" who self-publish these "blogs" on just about every subject under the sun. Don't know what a blog or a blogger is? Guess what? You're on a blog right now which is written by a blogger, me, and which is updated with no more effort than using a word processor with blogger.com. Basically Blogger.com is a piece of software used via a web browser like Microsoft Internet Explorer which allows you to type in whatever you want, spellcheck it, upload photographs and files, and then past it all into a web site available to the entire world within moments. Blogger is free and while it does not provide you the opportunity to use one of those fancy domain names like "Girls-softball.com" right out of the box, it does allow you to do that at some future point if that's the direction you ultimately decide to go.
Everything you upload or type into Blogger.com ends up residing on a web server. But you don't have to go out and rent space and learn how to manage that space. Blogger provides space for free and keeps the whole thing managed for you. It will request that you give your blog (your web site) some sort of name but, as I said earlier, that won't be like a domain name on the many sites you regularly visit. Instead it will be part of the overall blogger.com web site. To explain, this site has a domain name "www.Girls-softball.com" which you can reach by that name. But if I didn't want to manage a server or pay for a domain name, instead I could use something like "www.GirlsFastpitchSoftball.blogger.com" as the name and address of my web site. If another day comes and you want to get a domain name, shared space on a server or even your own server, all you do is go into some of bloggers tools and answer a couple questions about where your new server is and boom, it moves everything for you.
ETeamz is supposed to be easy but something tells me it isn't. Blogger is easy and free. And there is nothing which would prevent you from say starting on blogger and then changing your mind since the start-up time is minimal and the program is flexible.
What To Put Online
Whatever your motivation for having an actual web site is, the next question to be dealt with is what to include on the site. If you are using a web site to communicate schedules with your girls, please put on up-to-date schedules. Don't leave the tournament schedule or results for 2004 or earlier on the site for more than a year. If you won the ASA Nationals and want to promote this fact, go ahead and say that but the details, like all your scores at the tournament, are now unimportant. If your schedule is not yet complete but you want the world to know that you will be playing in ten PONY tournaments, say that - but don't list the places you might be going to unless you make it clear to everyone that this is not a final schedule.
If your goal is to attract girls with your organization's past accomplishments, it is fine to highlight the fact that you placed 10th at PONY Nationals in 2005 but ask yourself what is some girl or her parents going to want to look at next after they realize you are the greatest thing since the yellow red-laced ball or aluminum bats. Perhaps you bring in external coaches from Division I colleges during the late fall, early winter to teach your kids fundamentals. Maybe you have your own indoor practice facility. Maybe you're conducting tryouts. Whatever is most important that an unnamed late night visitor looking for a travel team for their monster-pitcher daughter to see when they come to your site must be there. A web site is your team's brochure. It says a lot about you, your organization, and the organization's values.
I do a lot of web surfing. Sometimes I look for team web sites to list or someone asks me to include their team in our Team Directory. I am frequently dumbfounded by what I find. Such and such organization is a "girls softball organization" but I am not told what age groups they sponsor, whether they are rec, light travel or a highly competitive team. Sometimes the web site is for a 12U highly competitive team but they were 12U two or three years ago and are now competing in 16U. Sometimes a rec organization exists in a town with 100 residents and 15 total children and I cannot determine which adjacent towns are included in the organization's charter. Even colleges do a poor job of reporting important information like how one would get recruited or where their games are being played. Put information on your site which is relevant to the viewers you intend to get. Check with your objectives and ask yourself whether everything you put on the site is related to them.
The very best web sites are, of course, the most simple ones. They read like professionally crafted brochures. Not everyone will get something out of the site but the largest majority will arrive at the site, know they are where they wanted to be, then see clear options about what information they can get here. Your typical web visitor probably wants to know what the team's name is, where they are based out of, who they include (locals only, state-wide, open), what kinds of tournaments or other play they typically engage in, whether they are a quasi-rec organization or a highly competitive team which never plays inside their home state, how to contact the organization, and when are tryouts.
TrafficSo you've thought about your options and decided a web site is good for you. You picked an easy to manage platform and built a site. You are committed to having relevant information for your target audience and you will update the information on a regular schedule so your site's content does not become stale and out of date. You've created a smooth interface and your home page answers all the important questions the majority of your target audience would want. Now what you need to do is bring in some of that target audience. It doesn't just happen. Somebody who wants to look at your web site has to find it, probably through search engines, and they have to sift through the myriad sites the search engines believe answer their questions. There are really two important elements to obtaining traffic for your site. These are understanding how people will search for you and obtaining inbound links.
The first important question involves understanding how people know your organization. If your organization is the "Southern California Batbuzzers" based in Fullerton, drawing players from Yorba Linda, Fullerton, Anaheim and surrounding communities, maybe you are known as "Orange County Batbuzzers," "the killer bees," or something along those lines. Whatever you are known as is what you want to call your web site and include in the textual message at least on the home page. Whatever a typical web surfer seeking your site would likely search for is an important part of your web name. In the above example, I would want to make sure my site said something along the lines of:
"We are the Southern California Batbuzzers, based in Orange County, California and including players from Anaheim, Fullerton, Yorba Linda and adjacent So-Cal communities. We are sometimes called the "killer bees" because our bats will relentlessly sting our opponents. We are always looking for a few good players who want to play high level ASA tournament ball - our 18U girls took third place in 2005 at ASA Nationals in Oklahoma City. Our top teams travel to many out of state tournaments but if this doesn't interest you, perhaps one of our developmental teams - local tourneys only - would be a right fit. We conduct tryouts in October so check back for dates.
Our organization sponsors teams ranging from 10U light travel through 23U intense international competition levels on Gold, Silver and Bronze teams. Gold level is only for those girls who are likely to play division one college ball; Silver is for good high school players and Bronze accomodates a broad variety of other players who want good competition but who play other sports or are not quite as competitive as the top girls."
If your site says your message succinctly, completely and gives the viewer everything they would immediately want to know, traffic will likely find you.
The second consideration for getting targeted traffic is to obtain links to your site from other sites. There are any number of ways you can accomplish this but let me explain a few important ones. First of all, if you host your site on one of these big "systems" like Eteamz, Leaguelineup or Blogger, chances are pretty good that you will be reachable via the search engines. These sites make it easy for search engines to find sites. Blogger is probably the better option since it is owned by Googe (the biggest search engine) and all indications are that Google routinely spiders blogger sites due to their tendency to post fresher content. Aside from these access points to search engines, another way to get traffic is to post links into link directories. There are the big behemoth directories like Yahoo or DMOZ and then there are far smaller directories like ours. A link in any one of these makes it more likely that your target audience will find you. But if you submit your link to one of the big places, it could take months, even years before you are listed. This site will probably list yours in a matter of weeks, if not days or hours. The same can be said of the web sites of sister organizations. If you have good relations with a local rec league or competitive organization against whom you play, ask them for a link from their web site and offer the same in return.
Another place you can sometimes get links is via the online version of local or regional newspapers. If you are posting a tryout bulletin in a newspaper, make an inquiry about whether they can include live links in their online versions. Some do, most don't. In any event, always post your web site in your newspaper ads even if it isn't a real link. And if you visit softball forums where people routinely post links to their teams, do the same. These may or may not be visible to the search engines but there's no harm in doing it to a reasonable extent. And if the search engines can't see the link today, it is just possible they may be able to tomorrow.
The best way to get traffic is links from other sites but not because people will move from one to the other. They probably won't. Having a link from a site to yours tells the search engines that you are at least that important so they will rank you higher for a search of, for example, "Southern California Competitive Softball."
ConclusionWell, that wraps up what I've got to say today about building a "web presence" for your softball organization. There really is too much to write about in a single article but I've tried to hit the important considerations quickly here. Perhaps when the spirit moves me, I'll develop some of these topics further or open new ones.
 
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