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:





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:

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.






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!)




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!



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

Make Your Website Earn Your Club Money!

You have a Web Teams site, all of the players and fans visit it, how can you make the website earn your club money???

Well earlier this year we were alerted to the excellent easyfundraising.org.uk website (click logo below).



All you have to do is register your football club with their site and then whenever your players/fans shop online, up to 15% of the value of their spend comes back to your club.

Here's a link to one of their press releases on the reputable website fundraising.co.uk
http://www.fundraising.co.uk/news/2008/05/08/easyfundraising-website-raises-over-%C2%A3350000

Here's a link to register your club and get started:
http://www.easyfundraising.org.uk

In terms of the names of some of the retailers involved, here's a quick list:

• Amazon.com
• JohnLewis.com
• Dell.com
• Argos.co.uk
• HMV.com
• Play.com

If you can get 10 people (yourself included) to push 5% of an average £500 annual online spend through your club then that could be a cheque for £250.

You can promote the EasyFundraising idea through a news item on your site and of course your site links and site sponsor areas.





Update (10th November)

Check out a couple of Case Studies for sites using this idea:
- Fundraising Case Study

A Permanent Fixture?

We have had 7 or 8 users telling us that they have been having problems adding fixtures to their Web Teams site in the last couple of months.

Pretty much all of these reports are from users with aol.com email addresses.

It looks pretty likely that the AOL version of the web browser was not happy for some reason with our Add Fixtures site admin page. (Technical note: pretty certain this was a security clamp down on the window.showModalDialog method).

So now we have changed the Add Fixtures page so that you enter your fixtures inline within the single page. When you are happy with what you have added, you click Submit. The screenshots below show this in action.

As this page is now pretty new, please report any unusual behaviour to us:
support@webteams.co.uk

Back to School

To get to where Web Teams is today we've had good ideas and some not so good ideas.

One area of Web Teams that we worked on a few years back was the "fun" area.

Banana Football in particular was a success and for a few months got some good world wide publicity.


Play Banana Football Now!

One game however that sadly didn't ever see the light of day was Web Sums...

...until today!

The idea was to wrap up the classic Little Professor computer game from 1980 that the Blog Editor used to play as a 6 year old... and put a modern spin on things with a comedy Wayne Rooney cartoon face.


Play Web Sums Now!

For those with kids, it isn't a bad little game to get them to do a bit of maths, And for those big kids, come and have a go if you think you're clever enough.

The Blog Editor can do a sub 8 second time on basic addition and a sub 20 second time on advanced multiplication (and that is with 13x14 thrown in).

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.