Monday, 20 October 2008

Web Teams on your Mobile Phone

In the last twelve months the number of people with Internet access on their mobile phones has gone through the roof.

There will be at least one player in your team with the Internet on their mobile phone in the changing room before the game or in the pub after the game.

So from today, they can get a special version of your Web Teams site on their mobile.

To do this, it's very simple.

1. Go to your Web Teams site on the phone

2. Click the "Low graphics" hyperlink at the top of the page

3. Bookmark the site within the phone's memory

The two screenshots below show the "Low graphics" hyperlink on the full Web Teams page and then the smaller, leaner Web Teams page as it looks on a mobile phone:

Web Teams mobile 01

Web Teams mobile 02

The advantages of the "Low graphics" page on a mobile phone are:

1. All of the information can be seen on a small screen

2. Only the really important information is downloaded - if you have a low speed Internet connection then this is massively important.

Consider the current Tipton Town FC site http://www.webteams.co.uk/tiptontownfc

Their homepage has 48KB worth of text, 53KB of pictures and some javascript and css files to download. This is well over 100KB in size and can be very frustrating if you have a slow connection.

The equivalent "Low graphics" version is only 14KB in size. It will download around eight times quicker AND fit your mobile phone screen nicely.

If you do use your mobile phone to access Web Teams - please let us know.

If you want the facility to quickly enter news items to your site from your mobile - again, please let us know.

UPDATE (23 October)

Since this feature went live on 19th October over 300 unique visitors have been to a Web Teams page on their mobile! The Eastport South Manor news items page has proved to be the most popular so far:
http://www.webteams.co.uk/NewsItemsLowRes.aspx?team=esm

It's early days, but it's nice to know that this seems to be a successful addition to the Web Teams service:

Monday, 13 October 2008

Web Teams and Google

As Google dominate the internet so much, at Web Teams we are aware of the importance of getting your site into the Google search index.

If you set up your own website from scratch it can take months to get into the Google search index and years to move up the rankings to the top results. Maybe try doing a search for "search engine optimization" (SEO) and check out how much companies pay to be high up on the Google rankings.

Well, with Web Teams, you do not have to worry about any of that. We make sure that all of our pages are designed so that they are very easy for Google to index. We have our site map registered with Google and as a top 100 UK Sports site Google spider all of our team sites regularly.

A few examples of this are demonstrated below:

1. Frequency of index
Red Hill FC, who have been with Web Teams for three or four seasons, posted a news item on Sunday 12th October. By Monday 13th October this news item was in the Google index.

Google 01

Google 012


2. New sites
CHESLYN HAY F.C under 11s joined Web Teams on Monday 6th October. Doing a Google search for CHESLYN HAY F.C 11s will return search results for their site (less than seven days later!)

Google 02


3. Top returns
Do a Google search for Boreham Wood, the first search result is for their Web Teams site. Please note that incredibly the Web Teams site is higher on the search returns than the actual Wikipedia site for the town Boreham Wood!

Google 03

Why not try this for your site? - pick a phrase from one a news item from one or two weeks ago and see how high up your site is in the Google index.

Remember other methods to move your site up the Google index include:
  1. Get others webmasters to link to your site
  2. Post your URL as a signature on any posts you make to newsgroups or discussion forums
  3. Add a couple of news items and a match report each week to your site
  4. Post your URL on your town's Wikipedia page