Class Politics New Class Website: Suggestions Please.

The class is trying to make some small money off the website. Google Ads to start, and possibly direct ad sales down the line.
 
That's kind of what I figured and as long as it doesn't take over the page or anything.
 
I really had to fish to find a RESULTS link. Why not have it featured in the bar along the top?

Also, I'm assuming that either FLEETS or DISTRICTS is going to be removed because the information in them is identical. If one is removed there would be room for a RESULTS link.

The site has a nice easy to read look.

Merrily
 
Look for the new site to go live to the general public around 9PM EDT this Thursday!
 
SPAM is an unsolicited email message. The advertisements on the class website are not spam, but simply advertisements. They are not in the way of page content and help the class cover the cost of web services.
 
I don't much like the automatically generated ads either. Gives the site a cheap and unprofessional look. If you go to the Racing Information page you will currently see ads for cosmetic laser surgery and laser pointers. I suspect the class won't be making much money by click-throughs on these items.:rolleyes:
 
Since the ads are in gray and the same color as the background, they don't seem instrusive to me, thus not cheap. However, I can't see how Laser surgery will generate much traffic from the site either. It does remind me of this past summer when I got my picture in my city's paper while sailing my Laser, and yup, coincidentally there was a Laser hair removal ad just below. But hmm... maybe the editor had a sense of humor.

Merrily
 
I didn't see the ads at all - why ? Because I use a HOSTS file on my PC that does a nice job to block stuff like that... If you are also tired of ads showing up on pages that you visit and also want the added benifit of having the pages load faster, go here and read up on using HOSTS files -
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

I disabled my hosts file so I could see what the issue was - If the class gets ALL the revenue from the click thru's on the ads then I'm ok with that. (especially since I'm turning the hosts file back on :) )
 
Merrily said:
Since the ads are in gray and the same color as the background, they don't seem instrusive to me, thus not cheap....
Merrily

Maybe I wasn't clear. It's not the color I object to. The whole idea of using automatically generated ads does not IMHO create an image of a professionally run class association.

Another issue - I see Google is now placing ads on our site for other classes of boat. Is that really what we want prospective Laser sailors to see?
 
It may not be e-mail, but it is definitely unsolicited advertising. I really don't see how they add to the website or the information available. In my opinion the google ads should go.
 
torrid said:
It may not be e-mail, but it is definitely unsolicited advertising. I really don't see how they add to the website or the information available, and it gives the website an amateurish look.

Well I guess in theory it was solicited by Bradley. But soliciting is not always a good thing. :rolleyes:
 
Old Geezer said:
Well I guess in theory it was solicited by Bradley. But soliciting is not always a good thing. :rolleyes:

This was a class decision. Bradley is only helping to create the website under their direction.

Merrily
 
The Class and the ads?
From my perspective, we have a shortage of resources. The ads are supposed to help with that shortage by generating some revenue.
Certainly this discussion could be moved along by someone making a more detailed description of the plans fpor the revenue.

I suggest we make up some dedicated uses.

Examples of dedicated uses for the ad revenue:

1. The ad revenue will be used to pay a person $12.50 per hour to find regattas where Lasers are welcome and and post information about those regattas on our website.
2. The ad revenue will be used to pay $5 per regatta for every NOR posted on our schedule. The posting would have to include dates, times, fees, email and phone contacts and directions to earn the $5
3. The ad revenue will be used to buy Bradley a new boat
4. The ad revenue will be used to pay Shevy for the rights to his Dr Laser web materials. The class plans to collect and offer $10 per page.
5. The ad revenue will be used to pay a person $10 per page to transcribe and post as PDF files every available Laser newsletter from 1972 to the present.

Or something along those lines
 
Or the ads will be used to pay someone $12.50 an hour to phone every member of the class who left since Fred got fired and persuade them to rejoin the class.
 
Just checked out the NA Class site, haven't looked at it for a couple weeks - couple additional comments:

I understand that the Masters events are not in the "Majors" group for the listing that is on the main page in the "Latest Events". IMHO,considering the masters group makes up a good portion of the dues paying members, it might be nice to have their events listed there too - plus it makes it seem like more is going on in the class activity wise which can only lead to more people wanting to join in the fun.

On the calendar - Again, IMHO, the format gets quite confusing when there are multiple weekend events on the same weekend and one or more of them are a single day event - If the event is a two day (or more) event, it should stay on the same row for both Sat and Sun - maybe move all the single day events to the bottom of the listing - take a look at the June listings to see what I mean vs Feb.
 
49208 said:
Just checked out the NA Class site, haven't looked at it for a couple weeks - couple additional comments:

I understand that the Masters events are not in the "Majors" group for the listing that is on the main page in the "Latest Events". IMHO,considering the masters group makes up a good portion of the dues paying members, it might be nice to have their events listed there too - plus it makes it seem like more is going on in the class activity wise which can only lead to more people wanting to join in the fun.

On the calendar - Again, IMHO, the format gets quite confusing when there are multiple weekend events on the same weekend and one or more of them are a single day event - If the event is a two day (or more) event, it should stay on the same row for both Sat and Sun - maybe move all the single day events to the bottom of the listing - take a look at the June listings to see what I mean vs Feb.



The current calendar has a number of deficiencies which we are working to remedy... some examples include:
1) Events can only be assigned one category... So, for example, the US Nationals is a "major" event, a "Full Rig" event, a "Radial" event, a "District 15" event, etc. But right now we would have to enter it for each category and that really would make a mess of the monthly view...
2) We don't have as much control over what gets displayed in various views as we might like. For example, I think the ordering of items in the monthly view is by order of "categories" and we don't seem to be able to control that.
3) Current formatting limits the number of items displayed on the front page to just 2. So, the events listed there are limited to "major" events to make sure the "big" events do get listed because of the above ordering issues. You make a good point about Master's events, we can try turning that on and see how it works.
4) When displaying the District schedules you don't see all the information you really want to see unless it is entered as part of the "Event Name"...

Two comments about all of this:
1) We knew of some of the issues with the calendar but felt it was more important to get the calendar up and running and deal with the problems than to have nothing.
2) Before making big changes to the underlying calendar we also wanted to get some operational experience to help find other potential problems, see how it worked in practice, get feedback, etc.

We are getting the ball rolling on making the modifications and I am hopeful we will soon have a solution to these problems.

In the meantime, continued feedback is extremely useful. The more we get the better we can make the site!

Tracy
 
Tracy, Thanks for taking the time to reply (and in depth). Sounds like the team is on top of things.

FWIW, just having a working calendar is appreciated.
 
When I use the calendar, I'd like to be able to jump directly to any month, rather than having to scroll through them all. Or am I missing the magic button?

Merrily
 
Currently the top item in the Popular list in the bottom right hand corner of the home page is '404'. Not a good thing.
 
Old Geezer said:
Currently the top item in the Popular list in the bottom right hand corner of the home page is '404'. Not a good thing.

Yeah and I keep resetting the hit count too.

Having gone through every link several tmes (I'm fairly certain I have at least), I've pretty much convinced myself the reason for the high "404" count is because we are using "Search Engine Friendly" URLs. The site is run by PHP accessing a MySQL database which means a standard url would have a "?" with a search string following it. Apparantly search engines other than google decide any url with a "?" in it is malformed and won't index such pages. So, the urls are reformatted to make them "friendly" to search engines. As I understand it, the reformatted urls aren't, initially, valid so they cause a "404" type error which is "caught" by some formatting code which then forms the proper expression. I'd think this code would also reset the 404 condition but my guess is that it isn't, hence the growing hit count on that page.

On the other hand, maybe when you are looking for a problem you never find it. If anyone out there is getting a "page not found" error, please let us know so we can fix it!


Tracy
 
Just having the site up and running and constantly being improved is great. Let's not ever declare the site perfect or even good enough

Remember when Borden 's ads claimed their milk was good because it came from contented cows??

Troyer's Dairy in Union City, PA had a billboard:

OUR COWS ARE NOT CONTENTED. THEY ALWAYS STRIVE TO DO BETTER

We need to think outside the old box. If the website is going to become our new major tool for Class management, we should also consider reworking the entire operation of the entire association

It sure would be great if we could find a way to compensate Bradley financially so he will WANT to continue for the long term...or at least until he turns 30 by which time I hope the old fart finds and trains a replacement for himself!!! Retired 30 year old Bradley should be sailing not managing a damn sailblat organization. Let the youngsters he recruited do that while he plays.

Perhaps it is time to do as the ILCA constitution says and write up a set of By laws to "carry out the functions and responsabilities of the region." Our current system with an Executive Secretary and a mailroom may be outdated.
If the information gathering and dispersal chores of our class management are going to be largely handled using tools maintained by different staff, the funding should be moved from the old newsletter, mail and phone staff to those who manage and gather information for the electronic media.

Funds dedicated to information gathering and dispersal is a HUGE portion of annual NA Class Budget. Between 1999 and 2002 no less than $25,000 per year was spent on labor whose sole purpose was to gather regatta information, make schedules, get results, write articles and format the information for the newsletter and website.
( side note>>>I used to spend a few thousand bucks year on film and developing. We should have some available dollars from that budget with digital cameras in use)

In recent years the class has listed under 30% of the events formerly publicized on our website and in our newsletter. Articles, results, and photos are nearly non existent in the newsletter and available for only a handful of events on the website.
Since late 2002 the members have been able to bypass the paid staff and list their own events. Although the member contributions have been much greater than in past years, the total number of events and the timeliness of their scheduling has been pathetic.
If the Class Secretary is no longer going to perform the vast majority of the information and scheduling task, we must consider re assigning the funds formerly allotted to the paid staff for accomplishing those tasks.
How much money should we take out of the Secretary budget? $25,000 is merely a good number for discussion. If the website team can earn some money through advertising or merchandise sales ar some other schemes, the Class operational budget for electronic media could be much greater. Would the Electronic Class Management officer be a good concept for a Constitutionally defined title?? Should that person be elected or carefully hired by the executive committee?? I don't know. I do think we need that officer /manager.
As JDE would harp endlessly>>> Someone needs to provide due diligence in the management of those funds as they are class assets.

Certainly we could use those funds to pay website developers

When the paid staff did the job, we used to have information about 300 or more regattas on line and in our newsletter. In recent years, at some times of the year, we have had as few as a dozen future events available for our sailors to read and become excited enough to plan a trip. The website has not had information about over 150 regattas at any time in the last three years. Nobody is doing over 75% of the work we used to pay someone $25,000 to do for us.

If we really wish to organize a successful effort to solve the abysmal performance resulting from our under-managed attempt to "have people schedule their own regattas and publish the schedules on line." I believe we need to do a bit more than "make the website easy to use."

Unless we want to do it ourselves, We need to give someone else a reason to do the work. How about??.....T$25,000 we used to budget for staff to do that. Suppose we were to have "bounty hunters" who could find regattas and publish "defined information which meets certain specifications" on our website. Then they could collect the bounty!!

Using my $25,000 budget and assuming every regatta posted on line in 2005 was paid for we could have paid $250 per posting. We didn't. We didn't offer the money and we didn't get the job done. No one was told the money was available ONLY if that specific work was done!!

I bet if we defined the necessary information and offered a $25 check for posting the information, we could get 500 regattas posted to our website in a year. That would use only $12,500 and leave the other $12,500 for those who develop and manage the site.

Just think, some kid could spend all weekend Googling yacht club websites, calling a few people, making certain the information was correct and when he posted the results after each regatta next summer, he would receive a check for a 25 bucks per event. Local guys might hustle to post their own events so some snowed in Canadian kid with a computer in North Overshoe would not beat them to the post and suck up that $25 posting bounty which had been budgeted for trophies and beer!!!
Not to pick on one kid but I bet sailor327 could find twenty events this weekend, get them posted, and find and publish the results later for that $500 which would become a new sail. Just turn him and the rest of the webbies loose to make our game great.

The kids might become addicted to the money and post events years and years in advance. They could take out loans for college with their future "results payments" as collateral.

On the website...which is the focus of this thread.

of course you could disagree with me about doing this and ruin the future not just of sailing but of our world as the kids would have no money to go sailing or to school.
Don't do it. But when the kids with no educatiuon find their way to the pool halls and end up as drunks on the streets, remember whose fault it was not!!!


What else can we do with the website to make Laser sailing boom???
 
Re: New Class Website: Good Discussion

Hi Everyone,
I will step in here to offer some comments and status updates on the new class website.

First, as Tracy has mentioned we are aware of the 404 error. I haven't had a chance to completely review the problem, but over the next few days I will be working on that.

Second, the website will never be finished. That is one of the greatest parts about the software that powers the website. There is always room for improvement, new plug-ins, features, versions, etc. We are in the early stages of the site. It was argued we should wait and get more loose ends tied up before launch, but we [the web committee] decided to go ahead with the launch and work out the details later since the existing class website was so horrible and outdated.

When you find a bug, 404 error, 500 error, 102493 error, whatever, send us a message and let us know about the problem. We can't fix something that we don't know is broken. The address for all of us is [email protected]. We review over every email and attempt to fix the problems as they are discovered.

Third, I think Fred's comments make sense. Since we are throwing around pretty numbers lets say the class website makes $200 a month in advertising. Now minus the cost of hosting, which is $12/month and domain name registration, which is $15/year. That leaves us $186.75 a month in pure profits from the website. Now lets say we offer $10 for every regatta posted. With the figures above, the class could support 224.1 regatta postings without taking money out of any other department of the budget.

The best news of all this, the class website's value per month is much higher than $200, if sold properly (meaning sold directly to advertisers, not google). The site could easily pull in $300-400+ per month. The plan is to sell direct advertising in the future. The google ads are meant as building blocks and placeholders.

These are just some thoughts and a lot of numbers. Please remember that not all the numbers used in this post are the actual costs / revenues but were used for representative purposes.

Cheers,
 
More website financing...sorry if I am boring people but we need to think about our future or not have one...

The class collects funds from advertising, memberships, and generous support from Vanguard @ one US Membership price per new boat manufactured.
There is about $130,000 total.

$20K goes through us and on to the ILCA @ 4.5 pounds per member

It takes a certain amount of money to gather the funds, count them, and pass out membership cards.
We have decided to pay people to do all of the above described work for us and they need to be paid.

Currently our budget is based upon an office staff that schedules events, creates newsletters and distributes those newsletters.

The website management is, with respect to our budget, more of an afterthought than our single most impoirtant tool.

When the newsletter was out single most important tool ( while Allan and I were setting up the budgets) we collected as much as $30K per year from advertisers to defray the cost of the newsletter. During my last year the entire cost of the four newsletters from compilation to layout to production to distribution approached $65K
We felt the Class WAS the newsletter and we believed a super newsletter would spread our information and drive a super Laser sailing game.
We put a lot of our money and resources into creating the newsletter.

Now we believe the website is the class. A super website can spread our information and drive a super Laser sailing game.

The question I cannot begin to answer relates to the percentages of our limited funds and manpower which should be optimally directed to the website and the newsletter and when we should pay for what kind of professional labor.

The class probably still needs to have a staff who collect our membership funds, maintain our membership files, distribute membership cards and perform necessary accounting.

As we change our emphasis from the printed and mailed media to the electronic media, I think we need to consider how we should redirect our resources.

Bradley's note above suggests a website which is self sufficient. I believe our historical budgets indicate we should be subsidizing the website and paying for professional management.

back when our website looked like this http://cerebus.winsite.com/laser/laser/
I spent a few hours every day doing stuff to the site. Some of the time was spent on the actual production of the pages. More of the time was spent on gathering new and checking old information. Lots of what was on the site was copoed and pasted from the newsletter. The site was an afterthought but we knew it was becoming a major important tool.

I could easily spend all day every day working on the new class website. My contributions would have nothing to do with the nuts and bolts of its operation. I would be gathering and publishing information. With no time allowed for actual site function development, there is more than a full time job to be done simply finding and placing information on the site.
If there is an opportunity to sail Lasers in North America, our site needs to help anyone who might be interested. Not only should our site tell where to sail, it needs to tell when, with whom, how to sail the boats, where to get one, where to get parts, how to fix, when to fix, when not to fix, which rigging works, what does not, what clothes, where to eat, where to sleep, what's the weather, who else might show up, what other events are nearby, who went, how they did, how did last year's event go, where is next year's event, who almost won, who was last, who was nice, what the spouses did, who watched, how to watch, when not to be in the way, what are the rules, who wrote them, PHOTOS, VIDEOS, probably a class merchandise store, ...I could go on with this list all day. If our website is to be supre functional and useful..and seductive and entertaining....Somebody needs to spend years and years compiling the information so whoever might need it can access it.

Then we have to make the interest translate from being at a desk to wanting to visit our site to wanting to check out what it is we know anybody who even tries it once will instantly fall addicted to and never ever stop for the rest of his or her life.... but if they do stop the website will be there to lure them back.

That was the object of the newsletter and I believe it is the object of the website,,,

for he who believes in Laser shall have eternal fun.

Summary: It is not a question of if we shift our emphasis and funding. The question is about how quickly and how much and what we just quit doing so we can afford our new set of tasks.
 
Re: New Class Website: Good Discussion

Bradley said:
we are aware of the 404 error.

I believe the 404 was the long lost prototype for a single-hander based on the 505, no?

Seriously, I just got around to finding the new site - looks great, Bradley!

I am far from most of you, so the more information the better. Good thoughts and ideas everyone - ever forward! The idea of community cannot be underemphasized.

Mike
 
jon said:
The 404 page comes from sites linking to pages that don't exist anymore. Used to be when you typed in www.laser.org it refreshed to http://www.laser.org/m/_general/default.asp so many many sites link to that instead of www.laser.org. Try that now and you see what happens.

There are tons of other pages from the old site that have met this same fate.

Copy and paste " link:http://www.laser.org/m/_general/default.asp " into google and you'll find plenty of sites with incorrect links.


Leave it to the physicist to find the most complicated solution and ignore the simple one!

Thanks Jon!!!

I rest easier now. And, presumably, the 404 errors will decrease over time as people slowly adjust.
 
[/QUOTE]
for he who believes in Laser shall have eternal fun.
[/QUOTE]

Now there's a bumper sticker.

Fred rocks!
 
Aw Blush shuffle golly whiz. You going to bring friends this year who sail or let them spend the weekend building houses??

About the calendar>>

I am in central Texas. As it is I can only post regattas for District 15 or major, masters, or worlds.
Most Texas regattas are attended by Texan and Oklahomans. OK is D-16 south.
Houston and Port Arthur Regattas need to be posted for District 14 as well.
New Orleans regattas need sailors from Texas and District 16, 17, 12, and 13.
The Easter regatta in Austin regularly has sailors from districts 23, 16, 21, 20, 18, 10, 14, 13, 6, 25, 17, 28, and sometimes a few Europeans or Aussies.

We need a way to post for multiple districts when we reasonably expect attendance from those districts.
 
Fred, we are currently developing this technology you are talking about. All of us on the web development comm are aware of this problem. We are working on the best solution. Some recoding of the calendar will be required to make this work.
 
and Bradley gets a new Laser when it s done??

Maybe with a Lamborghini to tow it??

And a gas card...

Shoot high!!!
 
gouvernail said:
and Bradley gets a new Laser when it s done??

Maybe with a Lamborghini to tow it??

And a gas card...

Shoot high!!!

I'm just guessing here, but I'll bet if Bradley could have anything as reward it would be a new computer servor (sp?) so that he could serve even more classes of sailors. . . with a Lamborhini to tow it.

Merrily
 

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