In development is our new Events calendar.  This will allow you to manage your club’s events through your website in the same way as you can already manage teams for fixtures.

A simple example of how this feature might be used is to simply display a calendar of all upcoming events at the club, a more advanced use would be to allow you to manage invites to your club dinner.  You will be able to invite all, or a select group of members to events, and they will be able to confirm their attendance securely online.  This will make the process of knowing who is going to attend an event much easier.

We anticipate this feature will be released at the beginning of April.

We recently agreed a 3 year deal to sponsor Old Chelmsfordians Cricket club in Essex.  This is an exciting opportunity for us to support grass roots cricket, within a forward thinking club. 

Thought I’d take the time to post about what we’ve been working on recently and wsome of what we are planning for the future.

 It’s been a really busy time here at Hitssports the last few months.  We’ve been gearing up to support Football, Rugby and Hockey clubs and now that’s completed we’ve been improving a few other areas of the system.  Notably we’ve launched an updated interface througout the admin area to make the system easier to use and including context sensitive help against every field.  If you click on pretty much any field label, or field in a form throughout the admin area the label and field will be highlighted and a context sensitive help message will be displayed.  This should make the system a whole lot easier to use and improves the consistency of the layout in the admin area.

We’ve managed to get the issue resolved with the image manager, so that when editing pages you will now be able to easily navigate to include images uploaded to your photo galleries or your members photos.  This has been a real thorn in our side for a while, it’s been very difficult to get resolved, so we’re very pleased!

A few people have asked about video uploads, this is something that we are currently working on and we hope to launch fairly soon.  This will allow you to upload any format of video file, and have it automatically converted to a web friendly format.  The video will then be displayed with a thumbnail, in your galleries, we believe this a really exciting feature that will become more and more useful with current mobile phones taking high quality video.  Alongside the release of video we hope to also release a new feature to allow all media uploaded to the galleries section (photo and video) to be tagged.  Photos/videos will be able to be tagged with a list of members in the photo/video, and a fixture that it relates to if relevant.  This all means that when you look at a player profile on your website you will also be able to easily see all photos of them on the system, and any video that includes them too!  Likewise the results page for a fixture will include and linked images or video.

 We’ve got lots more on the horizon.  Right now we’re trying to generate interest from new clubs, and we’ve decided to take out advertising in next months Four Four Two and Rugby World magazines, to generate more interest from Football and Rugby clubs.  We really believe our service is second to none, now it’s just a case of getting the message out there and building on the system that exists….

 We’ll update this blog entry with more details on our Roadmap soon.

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.

There are many reasons why your sports club should consider having a website. For most clubs attracting new members is key to maintaining and improving the standard of their teams. Having a website in itself won’t necessarily help you in bringing players to your club. Having a good website which showcases your club effectively may just give you the edge over your local rivals. Sports players, be it in Football, Rugby, Hockey, Cricket or another sport, when they move to a new area often search online to find a local club. You should consider that you not only have a website, but have a website that shows what a great club your’s is to be part of, and a website that potential members can find when they search online. If you want your club to thrive advertising it effectively on the internet is something you shouldn’t over look.

Many people seem to think it is enough to just have a website, and leave it to sit there. Clubs often put a website online, and then it just seems to be forgotten, someone is always going to update it but never quite does, but there is so much more that can be done. The web provides a way for sports club to centralise many of their administration functions. There is always a lot of effort wasted by a few people within a sports club, just keeping the club running on a day to day basis. In business the tasks that are repeated again and again are automated using Information Technology and processes. Why should your sports club be any different? We don’t believe it should and our websites help you to run your club more efficiently.

Hitssports was established by a sports fanatic, and experienced programmer, with the purpose of helping sports clubs make the most of the web. Our system is highly affordable, currently just £75 per year for a fully hosted solution, with a 30 day free trial available for you to fully test the features. That’s £75 per year for a website, that genuinely helps you run your club, gives you a website that showcases your club (including forums, photo galleries, results, match stats, player profiles with performance summaries, member emailer and so many more great features)If your club wants to move forward then having a website that not only advertises your club but assists you in the day to day running of your club will make a difference.