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Why Do You Need A Web Site?

The number of bridge clubs that have their web sites or intend to have one in a near future is growing every day. This push is being driven partly by "technologically aware/knowledgeable" individuals who know the benefits of having a Web presence, but also wide membership who are familiar enough with using email and web browsers and appreciate the convenience and ease that Web offers in accessing vast amount of information.

So, what are the benefits of having a Web site?

  • Visibility. If someone is curious about which bridge clubs are in a particular area, what do you think they are most likely to do? They'll use an Internet search facility like Google and type in "bridge clubs in XXX". If you don't have a web site, for these people, you don't exist. With a web site, you can tell these people where your club is, what facilities you offer, regular session times, fees, etc.
  • Convenience. Scoring takes some time after the session and players have to wait. If there were 2 or more sections this may take some considerable time. This is very inconvenient, especially after evening sessions that go well into the night. The scorer is under pressure to finish quickly and mistakes are made. With publishing results on the Web, players may leave as soon as the session is over, and usually by the time they get home, results are already accessible on the Web.
  • More detailed result information. Personal scores are usually available per request. However, this may be inconvenient to provide if more than a handful of players ask for them. With Web site, not only personal scores are available, but all other scores as well. So you can rate each board that you played and compare your score with others that played it.
  • Calendar information. Information about upcoming competitions is usually available only at the club, on the notice board, or leaflets. You have to go to the club to find out what is going on. The Web site allows you to get the calendar of upcoming events from your home. It also allows people to enter competitions via the Web interface, without having to come to the club.

Having A Good Web Site

When they reach a decision to have a Web site, most bridge clubs don't realize that setting up a Web site is just a minor initial hurdle. There are plenty of consultants out there who can set up a simple web site in a nick of a time. And the site is going to be there for many months and years to come.

While initially club members will be delighted, they will soon sink into a boredom, unless you update information on your web site frequently, not to mention DAILY. Having a static web site is like reading the same issue of your daily newspaper day after day. It is this information update that's taking a lot of work. If you hire a consultant to do it for you, well, you better be from a wealthy club. Even if you have volunteers who have the know-how for this kind of work, it becomes a strain after a while. The stream of bridge scores flows constantly, and if you don't publish them on your web site regularly and quickly, your club's phones will be turning red in no time.

How Can We Help?

The main goal of our services is to ease the burden of everyday site's maintenance. In doing so, the service is packaged so that it's simple and efficient to use. The interfaces were designed in a way that does not require any web design knowledge, they are natural and easy to
use, yet produce visually attractive presentation of information. Anyone who knows how to use a web browser is sufficiently qualified for the maintenance job. See Services page for more details.

Why Should You Use This Service Instead Of Doing It Yourself?

Even if you are an experienced web page designer and web site maintainer, or you club has people like that, there are still benefits in using
this service:

  • Productivity It takes very little or no time to do typical tasks like uploading web results. They are automatically processed, index pages created, results per board updated and the presentation is consistent. To do all of this manually would take a great deal of time. While initially people may be driven by enthusiasm in doing this, in time it becomes a real burden.
  • Division Of Labour The system has been designed to be used by people who don't have web page design knowledge. This gives the club more freedom to delegate maintenance tasks to people whose only qualifications required is how to use a web browser and fill in simple on-line forms.
  • Ease Of Use You enter only relevant data via simple interfaces, while the rest of markup, indexes, etc is automatically generated.