We’ve launched a new design for the main Hitssports.com website today. This comes only 3 short months after we launched the previous design! We’ve spent a lot of time looking at the stats we get through Google Analytics. We noticed that while the traffic we’ve been getting has been steadily increasing the number of new visitors signing up for the service is far lower than we’d like, and our bounce rate was far too high for new visitors. We are confident in the power of the product we are selling, we have many happy customers but we wanted more so we had to make some changes.

We’ve concluded from our surveys that the design we had previously launched was too corporate, and the message to our target audience didn’t get across. We’ve updated the webiste to include screenshots of a couple of sample sites as part of the header. This we hope makes it much clearer what we are offering. We have separated the menuing options out further to highlight the most important links by making them larger and bolder. These now take the format of tabs that are visible throughout the website, we’ve highlighted the “free trial” tab as this is what we’d like people to take us up on. Running the trial is the way clubs fully understand how our system works, and just how much it can help them in the day to day running of their club.

We have a few more updates to come to the site over the next couple of weeks. We’re hoping to introduce some screencasts (video of the system in action) to aid the visualisation of the product, I just need to get rid of this cold before I start any attempt at a voice-over to go with it!

Any feedback on the new design would be much appreciated.

Often sports clubs will within their ranks contain at least one person capable of building a website for their club.  Many clubs have an existing website that is maintained by one person within the club.  The difficultly is often that the burden of updates fall all on one person.  This can be fine when the site is initially built but very often the interest in the project is lost, or the member may move on.  This leaves the sports club with an out of date website, which is possibly worse than having no website at all.

A single person maintaining a club website would not be able to build a system with the depth of features offered by our system, which has been built through several years of development work.  We have built a system which contains a wealth of features that every sports club will find helps them in running their club.  The basis of the system is that all clubs share a similar structure, in having a number of members, who belong to various teams, which play fixtures during a season, each fixture then needs to have a team selected for it, and following the fixture a report would be entered and match stats added.  Our system makes it amazingly easy to maintain this information, and provides a range of tools to help you keep in touch with your membership more easily.  We believe the load shouldn’t fall on one person, so you can give access to any members within your club to spread the work, and help ensure that your website is updated regularly.

We believe that these advanced features should be accessible to all clubs, so we’ve set the pricing at a level that all clubs can easily afford.  The pricing is probably lower than you would be able to pay to just buy the web hosting required to run a similar website, and then you’d have the small matter of developing your own system.

We want clubs to be able to see exactly what they’ll get when they use our system so you get an unrestricted 30 day free trial when you sign up.  We’ll not ask you to enter any payment details until your trial has completed.  We believe a Hitssports.com website will help transform your club’s administration.

One of the challenges that faces most sports clubs is knowing who is available to play in a fixture when.  Anyone who has captained a sports side will know that you can end up spending much of your week phoning around finding who is available to ensure you have a full side for the weekend. 

The impact of not knowing who is available and selecting players who are in fact unavailable can be felt throughout a sports club.  A player short in the 1st team, can cause every team below that to have to find a new player.

We present two solutions to aid this problem. 

The first is to allow your club members to post their availabilities online .  This ensures that availabilities are stored centrally rather than by several different captains noting down or remembering availabilities.  Storing availabilities centrally ensures when a player goes on holiday for a couple of weeks nobody forgets when he or she is back.  Captains and administrators can view the availabilities through the admin area for all members for a given date range allowing selections to be made accordingly.

The second solution is to ensure all members are notified of their selection automatically and requiring members to confirm their availability.  Confirmation of availability is as simple as clicking a link in the email received, to say yes I can play or no I can’t play.  This action sends an email to the captain, or match organiser to confirm the update.  Requiring a confirmation ensures that captains know of any potential availability issues at the earliest possible point.