Tunbridge Wells Hockey Club

[James]

Finally, the new site I built for Tunbridge Wells Hockey Club has gone live.

http://www.twhc.co.uk

It's quite basic, as there wasn't a fantastic amount of content put forward by the club, but functions well.

I hate the red background but they insisted. I need to write a contact form to get rid of the "contact us" image. I also don't particularly care for the home page body text or the hyperlinks all over it - I want to encourage the club to write something a little more interesting.

XHTML and CSS all validate.

My main interest is to see if I can get the site top on a Google search for Tunbridge Wells Hockey Club (the old site was 20th due to no keywords in TITLE, H1 etc). Google still has the old site in its cache so I'm checking daily.

[David]

Well there's red and there's RED. Maybe you could subtly turn it down a bit. It's a nice simple site that works well. You're right about the contact thing - I recommend the one we used on the Bentley site - see Francis for details (or there are loads freely available online but not all are secure).

There's a 404 for "Fixtures" from membership.php

I think the club logo is a bit fuzzy on the header and a bit "broken up/pixelated" on teams.htm (I guess the first is a jpeg and the second a gif) - can you get a better version?

My main concern is to do with the updating of information for fixtures and teams. How will you deal with this because the pages are currently just static?

On members/reports.php are you using an automatic listing for the documents?

[James]

My main concern is to do with the updating of information for fixtures and teams. How will you deal with this because the pages are currently just static?

I forgot to mention that the team sheet and fixtures is managed by someone else on a different domain - I haven't touched that part of the site. I don't know the history, but notice the different URL:
http://www.sportsadmin.co.uk/twhc/teams.htm

I need to get a handle on the hosting: I believe it is hosted by a member of the club on a private server (I have to FTP updates to an IP address). There have been issues with the site being down before and I'd like to migrate to a reputable host, but no one at the club seems to know who owns the domain name or who exactly hosts it! :o

It's interesting that Google is not updating its cache on the site, although the new <title> and <meta description are appearing in the results page! I suspect it is on a low frequency, limited update schedule with Google, if there is such a thing.

[francis]

I got the info below from looking up the domain name on easily.co.uk. Interestingly, .net and .com are also taken. Oh, and, yes, that red. Makes me wish I was colour blind!

Domain name:
twhc.co.uk

Registrant:
Tunbridge Wells Hockey Club

Registrant type:
UK Entity

Registrant's address:
18a St James Road
Tunbridge Wells
Kent
TN1 2JZ
GB

Registrant's agent:
Fasthosts Internet Ltd [Tag = FASTHOSTS]
URL: http://www.fasthosts.co.uk

Relevant dates:
Registered on: 18-Jan-2001
Renewal date: 18-Jan-2007
Last updated: 01-Sep-2005

Registration status:
Registered until renewal date.

Name servers:
dns1.jons.us
dns2.jons.us

[francis]

I have a huge dislike of a site's navigation bar going to anything other than a web page (maybe it's just me). The Fixtures button would be, I think, better if it went to one page that had a list of the three different fixtures on. That way you could warn people that they were PDF documents as well. Not everyone has broadband and, if they're on an old, slow computer, Adobe's 800lb Acrobat Reader could actually stop people opening PDFs. My parents were in this situation - Acrobat Reader 6 (and 7) slowed their PC down so badly that they refused PDFs from everyone that sent them - they told everyone that they couldn't open the documents and to send them again in a different format, which wasn't always possible for the sender. I found Foxit PDF reader (http://www.snapfiles.com/opinions/Foxit_PDF_Reader/Foxit_PDF_Reader.html); lightweight and with a pretty-good feature list. Now they're happy :)

Oh, and there's loads of "click here"s on the site - surely you could have banished those.

If you can get a larger copy of that logo, I don't mind seeing if I can reproduce it. I did the same with the Bentley logo; it took a couple of hours in Illustrator but it turned out okay.

Oh, and, having seen the original, it's a massive, massive improvement. I must finish working on the unobtrusive version of that show/hide nav.