Sunday, May 4, 2008

New Website Launched

Green Mountain Baseball League



I began working on a new website about a week ago for The Green Mountain Baseball League.

The Green Mountain Baseball League resides in Vermont and is an 18 + Wooden Bat Baseball League. The league has 8 teams.

The site went live on Thursday May 1, 2008.

A few requirements from the client:
1) the site needed to go up quickly
2) the cost of building must be kept low
3) the cost to maintain/update the site must be kept low
4) the client needed a way to manage multiple lists in spreadsheet form
5) needed maps to seven Vermont baseball fields

The project started out with four pages in mind. The four pages quickly turned into twelve.

The Green Mountain Baseball League website uses Google Docs for the spreadsheet resource. This way the league can use one login (or multiple if wanted)(must be Gmail accounts) to maintain the spreadsheets (the have the baseball game schedule as well as team contacts and umpires in spreadsheet form). The spreadsheets are iframed into the site pages meaning that all the client has to do is login to Gmail, click 'Documents', select the document to edit, make the changes, and click "re-publish document" and the changes will reflect on the live site. No HTML/CSS or JavaScript experience needed! Good ol' Google - they sure know how to make things easy! See the game schedule page here Green Mountain Baseball League Season Schedule

The maps to the baseball fields are a result of embedding Google Maps into each field location page. See one here - Map Mount Mansfield Union High School The maps use iframe to embed the maps into the pages. Driving directions can be entered from within the iframe. Directions open in a new window (tab). Users can switch between satellite view or map view. The default is satellite view.

The site is built using the latest XHTML standards. The pages have been tested using Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.14, Opera and Safari for windows.

The site uses Google Analytics to track visitors.

Future possibilities: individual team pages? sure, each team could have it's own 'section' of the GMBL website. There could be team rosters (with pictures), photos from games, spreadsheets to maintain statistics etc...the only problem being cost. The cost would need to come from each team directly as I don't think that there is much money in the league budget to sustain paying me to update each team page. Just an idea....

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