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New look website coming soon

New look website coming soon

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Stage 1 of the brand new league website will be hitting your screens and smartphones very, very soon. We had over 32,000 hits last season from September to July and hopefully this only increase and promote our League even further.

Some other interesting facts about the website from last season:

  1. Total hits: approx 32,000
  2. PC/mobile visitor split: 50%/50% (iPhones made up 70% of the mobile visits)
  3. Avg. visit length: 2 min 59 secs
  4. Countries visited by: 51!
  5. Traffic source - direct: approx 49%
  6. Traffic source - search engines: approx 45%

As seems to be traditional at this time of year, I find myself pondering over new design ideas for football websites, both club and league designs, and trying to keep up pace with modern trends. This year is no different.

As we are all aware, key rule changes at the AGM in regards to the result reporting processes will now mean there is a far greater focus on the website and will once again be the focal point of our publicity and communications with everybody. Some of the key features I have focused on are:

  1. Mobile and tablet friendly - approx. 50% of all visits last year were from a device other than a computer!
  2. Greater social media integration - we want to keep in touch with everybody through every channel possible
  3. More visual content - nobody wants to read text all of the time so we are including lots of images and encourage clubs to provide pictures to increase this further
  4. User friendly interface - we recognise that not everybody will be confident with using the website so we will make it as easy as possible to use!

I always gauge our progress on this front against the winner of the Best League Website award which again evaded us this year and I am confident that once again we will have the best website in the County this season. 

The temptation to move over to one of the various league management websites such as "LeagueWebsite", "Mitoo" or "Full-Time" again was stopped in it's tracks as I consider them to be very boring and not unique to that league. Sadly many leagues around the country are taking up these options and very few are going for bespoke websites anymore.

It is however worth noting that the FA are leading a big drive to get every league in the country using their "Full-Time" system, a move aimed at then linking us in directly with the FA and County FA's administration systems to provide a movement of data in both directions. This has not been mandated on leagues just yet but is surely in the pipeline.

Stage 2 will be happening over the coming weeks ready for the start of the season with the Council Meeting on 4th September due to be when we officially launch the Club aspects of the system.

As always, feedback is a critical part of the success of a system and we welcome this. We recognise that we will not always get it right first time!


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