best football Website

[zody]

what is the best one you have come across and what is the address so others can have a read

[Cyclops]

Quote:

zody said:
what is the best one you have come across and what is the address so others can have a read

What are your criteria? There are lots of good sites out there but most of them are not particularly interesting to supporters of other clubs. There are also general sites but they tend to be biased towards the Premiership, Football League or are regional and not my region.

Then you get sites which are all gloss and look OK in Internet Explorer (let's face it, it's pretty easy to make a site look good in IE) but don't meet the industry standards so they don't look OK in other browsers (whether you are using Windows or not). I'm never too keen when I go to a page and actually see the code showing on the page rather than what it's supposed to do.

I think you'll find just about the best football web site is this one. It's got loads of good content (admittedly it is easier to do that if your visitors fill it up for you!), looks good and is a lot closer to the standards than most others. I have looked at it using a number of different browsers in both Windows and Linux and it still works properly in all of them. It is also about as close as any I've come across to being in line with the Disability Discrminination Act.

Another great site for supporters at this level is Football.Mitoo which has the results and league tables for various leagues, including the ESL.
http://football.mitoo.co.uk/

I s'pose this is where I should really plug the ETFC site 'cos I'm the assistant webmaster and it was me who did the big upgrade last year so visitors can now use different page styles, which was done because of the Disability Discrimination Act.
http://www.etfc.co.uk

[zody]

intersting points but it seems lots of good info spread on lots of sites, put it all together, thats a challenge for you and Mr Avery.

 

People forget the ammount of really hard work it is to design and build and up keep a good site.

 

Rob and Steve do a good job for our club http://romfordfc.com

[EFC_Callum]

www.tonykempster.co.uk

[Cyclops]

Quote:

zody said:
intersting points but it seems lots of good info spread on lots of sites, put it all together, thats a challenge for you and Mr Avery.

Well, there is always Non League Daily which is good for news.

Quote:

People forget the ammount of really hard work it is to design and build and up keep a good site.

Rob and Steve do a good job for our club http://romfordfc.com

My main problem with this is the menu, which is blue on blue and when you put the mouse over it is red on blue. This can cause problems for visitors with impaired vision.

Then there is some scrolling text on the screen, fortunately not a lot, which can cause problems for people with short-term memory disorders.

Then there is scrolling text in the status bar which is the SPAWN OF THE DEVIL! This can cause the same problems for people with short-term memory disorders. I hate it because I use a "tabbed" browser - i.e. one which can have more than one page open at once, with a tab for each one, like spreadsheets in an Excel workbook - and if I look up two sites which both have scrolling text in the status bar the messages fight for the right to be shown. I assure you, this is only faintly humorous and only for a very short time!

The above are the sorts of things which are easy to put right. Also, all the graphics should have alternate text because blind people use broswers which either turn text into speech or into braille and you are supposed to let them know what the graphic is even though they will never be able to get the benefit of it. This is especially important if you have button graphics which need to be clicked in order to go from one page to another. Alternate text should not be used for "mouseover" captions, though, because only Internet Explorer treats alternate text like that. Industry standard browsers only show alternate text if they can't show the graphic, so a "title" should be used for any captions. That is what we do on the photo thumbnails on our reports page.

The link which is there for you to make the page your browser's home page doesn't work in my browser at all. This is, I think, because IE is backwards compatible to an older standard and other browsers, such as Mozilla which I use are not because that older standard was never really a uniform standard (if you see what I mean). It's like the old joke, "Q: How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a lighhtbulb? A: They don't. They just redefine darkness as the industry standard."

Some people won't like it because the page uses frames. And a few of these won't be able to see it because they set their browsers not to accept frames. This isn't really a problem at all. There are very good reasons for using frames, as I realised when I was upgrading the Town site and had to do nearly 100 different pages because each one has a menu on it! I have a cunning plan to get round that in the future, without using frames, but it will require a full rewrite of the site and a lot of planning.

The good thing about your site is that information is there and easy to get hold of. The most important thing for a web site at this level (apart from making sure you don't get done for breaching the Disability Discrimination Act!) is to ensure that the site has up to date news for your own supporters and details on how to get to your ground for your visitors. OK, the visitors may want the news as well, but make sure that, if there is something it is important for your own supporters to know, it goes on the site. They should be far more important than anybody else.

As you can see from the above, I looked into this rather deeply when I realised our site did not meet the standards for the Disability Discrimination Act. There is an awful lot to think about when putting a web site together these days. Hopefully webmasters will get used to doing things properly and it won't be too much of a drag to keep things done that way.