I've always thought that www.afda.com was pretty neat-o.
There's quite a lot of good info that's pretty easy to find. Especially when compared to the UPA and WFDF sites, which either confuse with labyrinthine user-unfriendlyness or lack any in-depth information.
But I'm me - a committed, relatively technological ultimate player. Half of the fun in having a website for ultimate players is making sure that the stark utter newbies are catered for.
I have some issues with the site. Finding events is not immediately obvious, and there are usually discrepancies between tournaments found through the Calendar and Register pages.
The big issue I have is that it does not look professional. It's the face of the organisation, as far as a beginner can tell - everyone ends up there at some point to register themselves, and it's pretty unashamedly outdated, even compared to the UPA.
Look at the difference between this and this. Surely we can give David Colls free league fees at Albert Park social for the rest of his days if he spends a month or so updating the national website and its regional counterparts to match what the VFDA have.
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Tiger you are in luck!! The AFDA is putting together a spec for a new website. We will be asking for feedback on what requirements members want.
Something I was going to eventually implement alongside this schools promo DVD (which surely most people are starting to think is something I completely made up) was a new "front page" for afda.com with fancypants graphics, some videos and some places to go to play pickup games - something we only need to edit maybe once or twice a year. Then keep the current afda.com as a "members area".
Now that Worlds has been run and won, we can pester Pottsy and Tom B to get something like that happening :)
Of the nine hours woodie had to post that, it had to be in the time it took me to type up my comment :(
I think part of the issue is that Tom (Women's coach, UFNSW webmaster) and Pottsy (AFDA everything) already have a lot on their plate. And have already built the UFNSW and AFDA sites. The AFDA should get fresh blood in who have less on their plate, to revamp the site.
I think most of the current functionality is good. What needs improving is user content (members should be able to contribute more than just a photo to the website) and presentation (it looks several years old). It also needs to be able to integrate new tools, be they tournament registration pages, forums, wikis, tournament homepages, club sites, video commenting tools or things that haven't even been invented yet. Ultimate players spend a bunch of time at ultitalk, facebook, flickr, youtube - which of these activities should be hosted by AFDA?
And you need someone to actually implement the changes. There have been requests outstanding for over 4 years from UFNSW about upgrades to the registration system. The problem, as with many things in ultimate, is that we are relying on volunteers. If we are prepared to pay reasonable money to get a professional to do it. i.e. someone who does web/database design for a living rather than people (Tom/Jonathan) who work full time and whether you pay them or not still only have limited hours in a week to work on these things.
As Rog commented in another post, the missing item is not the volunteers to do it. The thing that is missing is a project manager to coordinate and drive the whole process.
I agree that the AFDA site needs updating. But comparing it to the VFDA site? Have you actually used the VFDA site or are you just looking at it?
Ha! Joomla has a lot to answer for in usability terms. If using an open source CMS for AFDA, try Drupal.
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