Building a web site: a primer
Issue: Volume 28 Number 4
In the gung-ho days of the dotcom boom a web site offered, in racing terms, a two-length start on the offline competition. Or so the bookies, also known as stockmarket analysts, promised. When reality brought those dotcom upstarts back to the field, sports coaches were forgiven a nod to their collective judgment in largely resisting the lure.
Almost half a decade on, however, it is clear that beneath the froth something really had changed in the way people, especially young people, source information. The Internet is now part of the daily routine of almost two-thirds of Australian kids and teens. The migration online of this key audience and market should prompt coaches still holding out to at least consider an online presence.
If they do, they will find that establishing that presence is easier — and less costly — than ever. Though before considering the ‘how’ in more detail, a short detour through ‘why’ build a web site and ‘what’ to build is in order.
Planning
Why a web site rather than some other type of online presence? Providing a clear answer is the best way to avoid splashing time and money on a site with no stated objectives. Those objectives might be to:
- provide or link to competition and training resources
- facilitate communication between athletes
- allow for athlete feedback
- publicise coaching services and products
- facilitate online ordering and payment.
Having stated the objectives, coaches should assess the best medium for achieving them. To handle infrequent feedback from athletes and parents, for example, an email address on a business card is probably sufficient. And a web log or ‘blog’ can substitute for a whole web site if a coach simply wants to share his or her personal thoughts in diary form (Sports Coach 272).
Assuming a web site is the chosen medium, the next step is to choose the content that will achieve your stated objectives. Good places to start are other web sites. Check out competitors or similar organisations and see what they offer online.
Keep in mind who your users will be. Be they athletes, colleagues, prospective clients or parents, the content of your site should reflect their interests and priorities. Set out a basic structure and content headings on paper or in a word processor (a flow chart can be helpful) and test them with as many potential users as possible.
Design
Having refined the content of the site, the next step is to wrap it in an attractive design. Design involves creating a ‘look’ for the site; then expressing this as HTML, the computer language understood by Internet Explorer and other web browsers. Deciding which of these tasks to outsource and which to undertake yourself is where having ‘why’ you are building the site clear in your head can pay dividends.
Professional help for both tasks might make sense if you run a coaching business and want to reach the 50 per cent of children (in metropolitan areas) that consultancy Nielsen/NetRatings say are using the web to research products and services. Otherwise you have several options for getting the job done yourself.
The first is to learn enough HTML to translate the desired look and structure of your site into web pages. While saving you more than $1000 in design fees, this option will cost a lot of your own time. So you may want to consider focusing your own efforts on design and buying software to take care of the technical side. Some HTML translators let you see the finished product as you create it and are like a word processing program to use. Examples include Hot Dog from Sausage Software (www.sausage.com.au), which costs around $100 for the standard version, and the free Composer from Mozilla, the makers of the hugely popular Firefox web browser (http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/). If fonts and colour schemes are not your thing, you can either use one of the templates typically bundled with this type of software or choose from one of the tens of thousands available online from third parties.
Hosting
Once you have a domain name (see box) and a design and content, the next step is to have your web site stored on a ‘host’ computer where the world can access it. Check with the company you use to connect to the Internet to see whether your subscription includes any storage space. Even if it does, you may not be able to use your own domain name and your allocation of storage space is likely to be small.
If such restrictions are a problem, consider a specialist web hosting company. When you enter into a hosting agreement, you pay for a certain amount of space on these servers. A basic professional site requiring 20–50 megabytes (MB) of space will cost you around $100–$150 a year, while annual hosting fees for a fully e-commerce enabled, content rich site of 100 MB or more will top $200.
What’s in a name?
As with any business or household, web sites require an address, called a domain name, so people can find them easily and refer others to them.
There are two main types of domain name:
- domain names that end in .com, .net, .biz etc. (for example, google.com). These are available for use by anyone around the world and are generally referred to as global domain names
- domain names that end with a country extension. In Australia this extension is .au (for example, www.ausport.gov.au)
Domain names are licensed on a ‘first come, first served’ basis to eligible applicants. So registering your business as ‘ACME Tennis Coaching’ does not give you an automatic right to the corresponding domain name.
Registering a domain name will cost you between $20 and $40 a year depending upon the type you choose, though many web hosting companies include a free domain in their packages.
Bells and whistles
Which brings us to the extras that can really make your site stand out. At the simple and, relatively, inexpensive end are forms that allow visitors to request more information or enrol for coaching services. Useful for encouraging communication between athletes are discussion groups and open blogs.
At the flashy end are e-commerce capabilities to allow visitors to not only enrol but to actually pay for services and products through your site. For a real ‘wow factor’ consider multimedia such as video showing your latest and greatest training technique.
Importantly, for commercial or confidentiality reasons, you can restrict access to certain features and information. For example, requiring visitors to register before they can download training information will gain you the contact details of potential customers.
Built it, but will they come?
Spend some time ensuring surfers can find the site in the first place. List it with the relevant coaching association and peak bodies for your sport. Also register the site with as many search engines as possible. Remember that where your site ranks on a search engine such as Google (that is, where it appears on the list of results to search for a ‘golf coach’) depends on the number of sites that link back to it, so organising reciprocal links to other, similar sites is important.
Finally, don’t let your new creation wither through neglect. The content of your site should be changed as often as possible, not only to ensure that the information is current, but also to keep users interested and coming back.
Examples of web sites by sports coaches
Get-A-Grip Professional Tennis Coaching
www.getagriptennis.com
Indeep Tennis and Fitness
www.indeep.com.au
Paul Sadler Swimland
www.paulsadlerswimland.com
Chris Graham Golf Coach
www.chrisgrahamgolf.com.au
Aikido Yoshinkan
www.yoshinkan.info
