Web 2.0 Teams

One of the big buzz words about the world wide web currently is Web 2.0.

In simple terms this is about the recent changing trends on the internet. The internet used to be a place to market your company - a brochure on the web. It is now a place where a community can be created, content and functionality can be pulled from other websites and your content can be made available to other sources.

We'd like to think that Web Teams has always been a bit of a Web 2.0 type of a website.

1. No HTML skills, no problem
Web Teams would have nothing if it wasn't for the team sites. These are created by you.

For our part, we have produced the template site design and the code behind to allow you to enter your match reports and news items. This gives you a great looking football website without having to be a HTML genius.

But it's the power of the community of people who use and visit Web Teams that makes the site what it is. Since 1999, over 10,000 team sites have been created - we're very proud of this fact.

2. Sharing video content
You can now upload videos from your mobile phones to YouTube. You can embed these videos in your match reports and news items. You want to show your star striker scoring the winning penalty on the Saturday afternoon? Get your mobile phone or camera out, video it and have it up on your Web Teams site by Saturday night.

3. Your latest content wherever you want it
Our previous blog post Go Go Web Teams Gadget explained how you can get the latest news from your site on your Windows Vista Desktop or your Google Homepage.



4. Share any content on Facebook
One or two of you may have heard of a little website called Facebook that's doing quite well in the UK?

Well, you can click on a news item or match report or player page within Web Teams to post that content to your Facebook profile. Your Facebook friends can then get this information and comment on this.

Go Go Web Teams Gadget!

One Web Teams feature that visitors to your site may not be aware of is the Web Teams Gadget.

This feeds live news from your site to either your Windows Vista Desktop or your Google homepage.

The screenshot below shows the gadget working on Windows Vista. Click here to find out more about the Windows Vista Gadget



The screenshot below shows the gadget working on your Google homepage. Click here to find out more about the Google Gadget

The Football Season Starts Here

This weekend marks pretty much the start of the football season in the UK with the Charity Shield, the start of the main football leagues in England and Scotland.

At Web Teams we're going to stick our neck on the line in this blog post and predict the winners of each of the main leagues. If you think you can do better - then please add a comment to this post and we'll check in 9 or 10 months to see if anyone got their predictions correct.

English Premiership: Arsenal
English Championship: QPR
English 1st: Leeds
English 2nd: Darlington
Scottish Premier: Celtic

Web Team is going stronger than ever - so thanks to everyone for continuing to use the service. We've never had so many sites running at this stage of the year. This Blog is also getting a large number of hits, around 300 people a day read it - but please add your comments and make it more of a community (add comments link below this post).

We leave you with two YouTube videos:

1. English Premiership Goals of the Season 07/08


...and for those that don't like Ronaldo back heels and want to see "proper football" on "proper pitches", here are some great goals from the 1970's...

2. English Goals of the Season 1972-1982

Attract more Visitors to your Site

Some weeks ago we posted a post on what team sites got the most visitors (read article).



Here are five quick tips how to maximise the traffic to your Web Teams site.

1. Get higher up the Google search results
To get higher up the search results in Google you should do two simple things A. update your site regularly and B. Get as many other sites to link to yours.

2. Add your web address to the bottom of your emails
If you write an email, use an email signature at the bottom such as

Regards,

Joe Bloggs
Fulchester United
www.webteams.co.uk/fulchesterunited

3. Mention the site in your match programme
Put the web address on the front of your programme. Maybe also have an advert in your programme for the site telling fans to check for the latest news.

4. Post regular news items
Visitors come back to a site again and again if they know there is good content on it. Get your team manager or chairman or captain to write a few words each week for the site and post these as a news item.

5. Tell others on the web about your site
There are loads of discussion forums and football blogs on the Internet. Post some articles on these forums telling others about your club. Also if you ever post any comments, remember to sign off with your web address as you would in an email signature.

Get a Club Page

If your club has multiple Web Teams team sites then we can provide you with a club overview page for free.

This will be a single page that sits above your Web Teams team sites and feeds off the information within these and automatically updates.

The best way to show this feature off is with screenshots and example club sites:


Fig 1. Credit Suisse site above for their first and second team.

Other club sites you may want to browse include:

• Bridport FC's page for the first, reserve and third team.


• Poulton Victoria's page for the first and second team.


• Withymoor Colt's page for the ten of their youth teams from unders 9's to under 17 girls.

If you would like an overview page for your club then send an email to info@webteams.co.uk. This is a free feature for all clubs that have three or more paid for Web Teams team sites.

How to Archive your Site

We've had a few emails coming in over the last few weeks querying how to archive a Web Teams site so it is ready for the new season.

It's hopefully quite easy - but here's a few screenshots below that should help...

1. Click the Archive Site option within your site admin area



2. Click to confirm



This then does a few things:

• Your previous season's site is archived


• You must return to the team entry page and set up your site for the new season


• Once your new site is set up - links to the old site(s) will be automatically added


• Previous season's data is also used on player stats pages

If you want to know more about the archive process please check out our help page on this:
- http://www.webteams.co.uk/Help017.aspx

See the Bigger Picture

A couple of small enhancements to tell folks about:

1. How to quickly see a bigger picture of the main team picture

Web Teams sites have a 300 pixel wide team picture at the top (see Fig 1.1 below). This allows us to show your news items and match report headlines near to the top of the page. However, if you quickly want to see a bigger version of a site's team picture. Just click on the image and a 600 pixel wide picture will be shown (see Fig 1.2 below).


Fig 1.1 Small picture


Fig 1.2 Big picture

2. Slightly bigger player pictures

The size of the player pictures you upload will now be 100 pixels wide, a little bigger than the 80 pixels it has previously been. This is now possible due to our wider site size compared with last year - so we have a little more room to squash bigger pictures on the squad page.


Fig 2. The blog editor as a three year old!!!

Post your videos on Web Teams!

At Web Teams our thinking has always been to concentrate on providing great football related functionality. Where another company does something really well for example Google with their graphs, or Facebook with their posted links, we look to utilise their technology.

The clear leader on the web for videos is obviously YouTube.com. And YouTube.com allow you to embed their videos on any site.

At Web Teams we have now allowed you to embed YouTube.com videos on your site.

To add a video to your site you must first post it on YouTube.com.

A simple way of doing this is to video a bit of your match on your digital camera. Then use Windows Media Maker to make it into a WMV file. Then logon to YouTube.com and upload it to the web.

Once your video is live, you need to get the unique id from the YouTube URL. The screenshot below shows this. Note that the characters before the id are v=



Add this unique Id to your Web Teams news item. Click preview to check it is OK.



Your video is displayed on your Web Teams site!



Why not upload some of your videos from your games and then post a comment on this blog post so others can view them?

How many visitors?

Now that it is pretty much the end of the 2007/08 football season, it is with interest we look at our visitor statistics...



The team that attracted the most visitors to their home page was Boreham Wood from the Ryman Premier League. Their home page alone received over 48,000 unique visitors!

To put this into perspective. Only four Premiership stadiums could sit this many people (Old Trafford, The Emirate Stadium, St James, Stadium of Light). If this many people tried to fit into the City of Manchester Stadium there would be over 200 left over standing in the car park.



Boreham Wood also had the most hits for a match report (Boreham Wood 1 AFC Wimbledon 0 - 800 unique) and for a player (their top scorer Simon Thomas - 1,200 unique).

But other sites were most popular in other areas.

Redhill FC from the Sussex County League posted nearly 360 news items! This attracted over 15,000 unique visitors who read their news.

Over 2,000 unique visitors browsed the excellent photographs displayed on Romulus FC's website.



The fun fantasy stats where most popular on lower league team sites. 2,000 unique visitors flocked to see who had the most fantasy points on Shadforth Plough's website from the Durham Sunday League (4th division).

Across all of our team sites a combined total of nearly one million unique visitors visited Web Teams. Our web community continues to grow every year - please continue to tell others about us and we look forward to the 2008/09 season!

Most frequently asked Frequently Asked Questions

At Web Teams we pride ourselves on having a pretty good frequently asked questions help area. This saves time in people emailing us a question and waiting for an answer on something that's been asked many times before.

This help area can be found at:
http://www.webteams.co.uk/Help.aspx

...and what are our most frequently asked Frequently Asked Questions? Our visitor stats show the following interesting results:



1. What do I get for my £15.00?
This help page was viewed over 1,600 last season! In short the answers include (1) The best football stats for your team presented in the most professional way, (2) Absolutely NO adverts anywhere on your site, (3) End of season archive and the use of stats from previous season... [read full article]

2. What format must my pictures be in?
This is becoming a more common question now that digital cameras produce such large images. The image quality you need for a website is MUCH lower than if you wanted to print out a 10x8" quality photo. So before you upload a picture to the web it is best to resize it down a little... [read full article]

3. Can I add a discussion board to my site?
Web Teams has always had a strategy of concentrating on doing football related things perfectly (league tables, goal stats, team progress, player stats etc...) and leaving more generic things (lots of photos, discussion boards, visitor polls, online videos) to the multi-billion dollar sites that are huge. Our recommendation here is to set up a Facebook Group for your team in parallel to your Web Teams site. This is perfect for banter and daft photos and things and compliments your professional looking Web Teams football site. A more full blog post on this subject will be posted in the near future... [read full article]

4. I have just signed up, how can I edit my site?
Simple getting started question that most reading this blog already know the answer to... [read full article]

5. What happens to my site at the end of the season?
Web Teams offers the much valued archive feature, where a snapshot of your old site is stored at a new URL and the stats from these previous sites are used on your site for the new football season. [read full article]

We do have one or two emails this time of year about people wanting to change URLS we answered this question in the blog post below:
http://webteams.blogspot.com/2008/06/get-proper-domain-name.html

6. How do I get a proper domain name?
Related to the point above. [read full article/ read blog post]

7. A player has left my team, can I delete him from my site?
Yes, at the end of the season. During the season, you should mark against them that they have left the club. In their player details area you should say why they have left the club. This way all of the player statistics stay intact. [read full article]


Please email in any suggestions for future blog posts.

stephen@webteams.co.uk