No more League Website's with League Secretary

[Larry Kincade]

Guys,
For those of you who haven't noticed by now LeagueSecretary has eliminated the individual league websites. Does anyone have another website host they use or know a host to setup a website. I put alot of hard and long work into setting up my website and now it's gone. What are others planning on doing now? My bowlers are very disappointed as well as I am.
Thanks,
Larry

[Lance Rasmussen]

It was a tough decision to remove the feature, however, when only 5% of the leagues used the feature, it didn't make any financial sense to invest in the costs to reprogram that feature and the dedicate additional server and database space when it was a free feature.

You might look at Tripod or AOL's free websites.

[Brian Atherton]

You can use the adobe export feature to allow you to display the standings sheets as formatted by BLS. You can export it to the website.

[Kerry Federer]

Most ISP's offer a free website to their subscribers. Check with your ISP to see if they offer a free site.

[Larry Kincade]

Thanks Guys, I'm very aware of the free sites but it was nice to have the bowlers E-mailed once the standings were updated; which they still are. Once they received the E-Mail they could easily get a link to the league's website. On the website I included our rules, prizelists, pot winners, special achievemnets among other things of interest to the bowlers. They can pretty much get anthing else stat wise using the LS site. Now I'll just have to add the link on the messages page and really highlight it so everyone can easily find it. I understood that cost would be an eventual issue; it was a great feature. Keep up all the great work; my bowlers love the convenience and easy of the system. I should be able to easliy convince my center to upload all of their standings.

[Mike Masek]

What's wrong with Bowl.com? You can subscribe for free e-mails with them.

[Lance Rasmussen]

As far as I'm aware of, Bowl.com does not have league websites. It only hosts static standing sheets.

LeagueSecretary.com hosts both static and interactive standing sheets.

The only thing in question was the fact that LeagueSecretary.com could not justify the expense and further development of hosting communities specific for each league, especially when it was under used as much as it was.

[Larry Kincade]

Lance, I completely agree with you about justifying costs. LeagueSecretary is far and above the rest when you consider everything you get and that's without even subscribing to anything. Keep up the great work!!

[Brian Bylls]

Our league last year opted to move away from leaguesecretary.com and develop our own league website. We host with 1and1.com. They are very affordable ($9.99/mo) lots of disk space (250gb) and plenty of data transfer (250gb/mo). I created our website using Frontpage, but they do supply software for creating webpages. I tried their software, it's nice, but I just have more experience with Frontpage. Included with the business package (which is what we use) they supply a really nice newsletter tool for notifying bowlers of when the standings are uploaded. Check out our league website at www.tmclassic.com. No a very fancy website, but it does the job.

[Lance Rasmussen]

Bill,

your site is functional, and thats key. There's also nothing wrong with posting to both places. This way if your bowlers want interactive standings or want to compete in virtual tournaments, they are free to do so. Also, LeagueSecretary.com automates the offsite backup, so you can retreive if ever a major problem.

[Brian Bylls]

There is a backup area on my website. When I upload the pdf files from BLS, I just copy over the weekly backup. I have multiple back ups on my FTP server just in case something goes haywire.

Maybe as a future piece of software, CDE can develop a turn key website software that registered users can use on any website (for a fee of course). That way there isn't any costs to CDE/Leaguesecretary.com. The cost falls upon the leagues.

My $.02.

[Patrick Lajko]

Developing a turn key website DOES cost CDE money. We do have to pay the employees. The cost does fall on CDE until/if/when we sell enough copies (and not have them bootlegged) to recoup the investment. And remember anything we develop would require tons of customization because everyone wants if done their own way.

I suggest you or someone else do it and sell it as an add-on product for BLS and make some money.

[Brian Bylls]

Developing a turn key website DOES cost CDE money. We do have to pay the employees. The cost does fall on CDE until/if/when we sell enough copies (and not have them bootlegged) to recoup the investment. And remember anything we develop would require tons of customization because everyone wants if done their own way.

I suggest you or someone else do it and sell it as an add-on product for BLS and make some money.

What about creating a modified version of the Kiosk program that can run on a web based system? The center that I bowl at (A Brunswick Center) doesn't use the CDE software for LRS. KIOSK isn't an option at our center. BUT a web based KIOSK system could be useful for not only creating a website for secretaries but also but for a center as well.

My $.02

[Lance Rasmussen]

LeagueSecretary.com is (of sorts) a web based kiosk system.

You can use the web to look up the league (using leaguesecretary.com) and see your standings vs use the kiosk software, select the league and see your standings.

You can use the web to look up the league (using leaguesecretary.com) and see your bowler history vs use the kiosk software, select the league and see your bowler history.

The fact is... if there was a lot more demand and use of the feature, we may not have removed it. But the fact is, very few were using the league website feature of leaguesecretary.com. We would rather invest in areas which get the most use.

[Derrick]

I uploaded to leaguesecretary.com last season and was unaware of there being a league website feature. I even spent a few weeks designing a website for our league, an idea that had no interest other than my own and was deserted.