| Mississauga Majors Teams |    |
| Team Sites : Resources |    |
SPECIAL REPORT : 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 2010 Major Bantam team is at:
http://www.upsdell.com/mmba/2010/MajorBantam/index.htm
At the start of the season you will also be told the address of a Mobile News page, designed for sufficiently capable cellphones, which offers the same news as the team’s News (home) page, but in a simplified form. Note that many cellphones have crippled browsers which will not work with the Mobile News page: for details, see “Why is the site different on my handheld / mobile device?”
For example, the Mobile News for the 2010 Major Bantam team is at:
http://www.upsdell.com/mmba/2010/MajorBantam/mobi.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 it may seem complex because it supports many Majors teams — more every year — and past years’ team pages are preserved so that you can look back on teams of yesteryear.
You can think of this site as a collection of small sites: a “team site” for each team, plus a “resource site” with pages shared by all teams.
Note : for historical reasons the resource pages are often called the “Other Pages”.
You should focus on two of the small sites: your team’s site, and the resource site. Ignore the ther team sites unless you need to visit them.
All pages have two types of menus: a vertical menu; and a horizontal menu. Vertical menus go only to pages within the current small site; horizontal menus go elsewhere:
The vertical menu is on the left side of each page. The menu has choices which go to pages within the current small site. The vertical menu for one team is similar to that for other teams, but the menu for the resource site is very different. Here are examples of the team and resource menus:
A team menu is similar to other team menus for the same year, but can differ from those of other years: the menus have evolved over the years as ways have been found to improve them.
Note : vertical menus for modern sites include Help menu items. In a team site, clicking Help goes to a page with information about using that team site; in the resource site, clicking Help goes to a FAQ page with information about using both the resource site and the team sites.
Note : an icon of a key (
) appears in a menu to indicate
a menu item which goes to a password protected page.A horizontal menu is on the bottom edge of the page masthead (banner). It has dropdown submenus with menu choices which go to other sites. Here is a working example of a horizontal menu; point to the menu items to see the submenus:
Note : the vertical menu is identical for all pages in a particular small site; the horizontal menu is identical for all pages in all team sites for the same year.
Note : the ”Resources” menu item in the horizontal menu, used to go to the resources pages, was called the “Other” menu item prior to 2010.
What Pages Look Like
Pages in this site can look very different. There are three reasons for this:
Over the years the page styles — colour and design schemes — have evolved, so the style for one year may be somewhat different from the styles of other years.
Before 2009 three different page styles were offered: the webmaster picked the style for the resource site, and each coach picked the style for their team site. The three styles look roughly like this:
Because each coach picked the style for their team, one team site can look very different from other team sites, even those for the same year.
Beginning in 2009 three page styles continued to be offered, but you can pick the style to be used when you use the site. The three styles again look roughly like this:
You can pick the style in various ways, for example by clicking on one of the above three thumbnails: click on them and see what happens!
When you pick a style, your style will be used when you visit all the small sites from 2009 on, so all the sites will look much the same to you: but they will look different to someone who has picked another style.
Style 2004
One page style is called Style 2004. The page masthead is sapphire, the horizontal menu bar and dropdown submenus are burgundy, and the vertical menu bar is silver, like this:
Style 2007
The second page style is called Style 2007. The page masthead is ruby, the horizontal menu bar and dropdown submenus are ruby, and the vertical menu bar is silver, like this:
Style 2008
The third page style is called Style 2008. The page masthead is ruby, the horizontal menu bar is ruby, dropdown submenus were ruby up until 2009, and the vertical menu bar is sapphire, like this:
Beginning in 2010, the Style 2008 dropdown menus were changed to sapphire to match the vertical menu, like this:
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.
To become familiar with your team’s site, go to your team site and read your site’s sitemap, which is in a sidebar of your team’s Help page.
To become familiar with the resource pages, read the resource pages’ sitemap, which is in a sidebar of the Resource Help page. You should then quickly take a look at the Help page’s FAQ, just to see how it is organized, and what kind of information the FAQ offers.
Surprises
This is generally a straight-forward site, but there are a few things which may surprise you:
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 green 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?”
At the bottom of the resource site’s Overview page — or at the bottom of a team site’s News page — you may see a notice about a browser update. One type of notice tells you that your browser is unsafe, hence you should update. Another type of notice tells you that you can update, but only if you wish. For more about this, see the FAQ “Why am I being told about a browser update?”
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.
