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GEORGETOWN EAGLESTeam Sites • by Chuck Upsdell |
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INFORMATION : Special Reports
New Users
This page gives information for those who are using this site for the first time:
When the Season Begins
At the start of the season you will be told the address of your team site’s home page. You should bookmark this page and visit it often, because this is where team news appears.
For example, the home page of the 2009 Minor Bantam team is at:
http://www.upsdell.com/gba/2009/MinorBantam/index.htm
You will also be given a “username” and a “password”, which you should record. Most of the site can be viewed by anyone, but some information is password protected.
Parents should give the following information to the coach or manager:
- The full name of the player.
- The first names of the parents.
- Phone numbers by which players/parents may be contacted. Indicate which numbers are for which persons, and whether numbers are home, cellphone, or work numbers.
- Email addresses by which players/parents may be contacted. Indicate which addresses are for which persons, and whether addresses are home or work addresses.
Important Note : this information will appear on a password protected page named “Confidential”, where spammers and the general public cannot see it. The general public can only see player names, which will appear on the page named “Team”: and parents may request that last names be omitted.
Important Note : after providing this information, parents should go to the Confidential page to check the information. Parents should tell the coach or manager if anything is wrong, or when anything changes.
Introduction
This site is easy to use, but one factor makes it a bit more complex than one might expect: it was designed to meet the needs of multiple teams. For this reason it has two types of pages: team pages, which offer information about a particular team; and resource pages, which offer information which is shared by all teams. A new set of team pages would be added for any new team: the rest of the site would remain the same.
A team’s pages are referred to as the team’s website. Indeed, the whole site can be viewed as a set of small sites: a small team site for each team, and a small resource site shared by all.
Note : team pages are retained after the season is over so that people can visit old team sites and review what happened.
What Pages Look Like
Team Page:
Resource Page:
All the pages are very similar, but the team pages are a bit different from the resource pages. The differences are mainly in the pages’ mastheads and menus:
Masthead : a red masthead (banner) appears at the top of every page, with the GBA logo on the left, a similar unofficial Eagles logo on the right, and “Georgetown Eagles” in the centre.
Team pages also identify the team and the season.
Resource pages refer to no particular team or season.
Menus : a gray/black horizontal menu bar appears below the masthead. Some menu items have drop-down submenus. Every page has the same three menu items on the left: , , and . Every page also has the same single item on the far right: .
Team pages have an extra menu item — two items for sites prior to 2011 — following the first three: and (in old sites) . These additional menu items have drop-down submenus going to pages for the current team. The colour of the extra items is distinct — with cyan text — to remind you that these two menu items and their submenus go to pages for the current team.
Resource pages have no extra menu items.
The page organization may change a bit from year to year as the site becomes more capable, and as better ways are found for presenting information: for example, a “What’s Up” page was added to the team site’s submenu in 2009; this new page has, in one place, news and scheduling information of common interest. Prior to 2009 it was necessary for people to go to three separate pages to find this information — and people can still do so — but now they can also find the information gathered together on a single page.
Previous years’ team sites may have somewhat different designs: for example, the font size was increased in 2009 to make pages easier to read.
The latest year’s team pages always have the same design as that of the resource pages.
Finding Your Way Around
The resources Help page has a lot of information about using this site. You should read two FAQs which are especially useful to beginners:
The above FAQs repeat some of what has been said on this page, but there is also a lot of new information.
Surprises
This is a very straight-forward site, but there are a few things which may surprise you:
Some menu items are , some , some . This is done to make it easier for you to know what will happen if you click on the menu item: clicking on a gold menu item takes you to another website; clicking on a white menu item takes you to a resource page; clicking on a cyan (bright blue) menu item takes you to a team page.
Text may be larger than you expect. This is because this site, unlike many sites, adheres to the best practices for sizing text. For more about this, see the FAQ “Why is the text so big?”
Those with large, high resolution monitors may find that there are large black margins on the left and right side of each page. This is done because this site tries to size pages to make them as easy to read as possible. For more about this, see the FAQ “Why is there so much empty space to the left and right of the page?”
If you print pages, much of what you see on your PC is not printed, including banners, menus, and decorative graphics. This is done to reduce printing costs: for more about this, see the FAQ “Why don’t printed pages look like displayed pages?”
Many pages require that your browser support the JavaScript language: all modern browsers support it, but most offer an option to disable it, and it may be disabled on your PC. To learn how to enable JavaScript, read the “JavaScript special report”.
If anything else surprises you, check the FAQs.
