British tennis frontpage for this site

Drew · Feb 8, 2007

RE: British tennis frontpage for this site

john · Top national player

Apologies if this is included somewhere on the site, but do you think it's a good idea to have links to official live scores for all the tournaments involving Brits each week?

Count Zero · Tennis legend

its OT, but what is still going on with the lta site, they are now great at giving info on juniors, but seem to miss of the sneiors, i cant fidn any mention of boggos perfoamce in wroclaw, you would think beating schullter deserves a mention. surely it cant be that hard to get it right?

Salmon · Tennis legend

We can pretty much guess the LTA's policy now - if we have coaches and a crew out there, you get info, or else you don't.
The reason the Juniors are getting the coverage from South America is because Colin Breecher, Lucy Ahl and a few others are out there. Evans went to Central Europe without an LTA coach (as far as I know), hence no mention of him anywhere.

Sheddie · administrator

Count Zero wrote:

i cant fidn any mention of boggos perfoamce in wroclaw, you would think beating schullter deserves a mention. surely it cant be that hard to get it right?

Oh c'mon Count, you know as well as me that anything Boggo does, the LTA doesn't count. Even if he beat Fed 2 and 2, I still bet he wouldn't get a mention on there !

Seriously though, their coverage has been shocking recently, they mentioned Aucks run last week but wrote nothing about Bloomers and Baker's performances in making challenger finals or results in Tipton and Wroclaw this week.

The coverage of the Condor de Plata event is high quality, though as Arka says, that's just because there's a team of coaches out there. It was the same with the Australia 25Ks last autumn.

imoen · Admin: Moderator+Tennis Legend

Maybe the LTA realised we were making the britishtennis.net site and knew they simply couldn't compete so gave up altogether!

I agree their coverage is shockingly poor but the way to fight the disappointment is to not visit the site very often and then each time you do there are loads of new articles! (admittedly they still say nothing about anything you wanted to read about nor have any quotes so then you have to come back here/to Britishtennis.net and satisfy the craving for real tennis talk!) See, problem solved!

RobC · All-time great

David, fantastic work on the front page - you're getting the news up there fast and producing an amazing level of output

2 thoughts:

1. It must be taking up a horendously large amount of time for you. I know there's a number of us who've offered to help, but I know that I'm holding off because I'm afraid firstly that you'll get there before me and secondly that if I put something up, you'll overwrite it when you upload......Can I suggest that you divide the work up more formally: either do the site in shifts: you do mon/wed/fri, Drew do Tue, I do Thu etc... or that you assign stories to different reporters. then we can either use the Blog to make sure we don't over-write each other, or we use this thread to say: "I'm writing an article, don't upload until it's there" or we post them on the board, and you cut & paste to the site.

2. We need to do better cross-linking: when a story goes up, we need a post on the relevant thread to say so, and we need a link to the relevant thread from the site.

Drew · Feb 10, 2007

RobC wrote:

David, fantastic work on the front page - you're getting the news up there fast and producing an amazing level of output

2 thoughts:

1. It must be taking up a horendously large amount of time for you. I know there's a number of us who've offered to help, but I know that I'm holding off because I'm afraid firstly that you'll get there before me and secondly that if I put something up, you'll overwrite it when you upload......Can I suggest that you divide the work up more formally: either do the site in shifts: you do mon/wed/fri, Drew do Tue, I do Thu etc... or that you assign stories to different reporters. then we can either use the Blog to make sure we don't over-write each other, or we use this thread to say: "I'm writing an article, don't upload until it's there" or we post them on the board, and you cut & paste to the site.

2. We need to do better cross-linking: when a story goes up, we need a post on the relevant thread to say so, and we need a link to the relevant thread from the site.

Could not agree more !!!!

Michael · Pro player

Sorry if I have missed something but how come Noami Cavaday isn't playing anywhere for the next two weeks and Georgie is not playing the week after next.

Sheddie · administrator

RobC wrote:

David, fantastic work on the front page - you're getting the news up there fast and producing an amazing level of output

2 thoughts:

1. It must be taking up a horendously large amount of time for you. I know there's a number of us who've offered to help, but I know that I'm holding off because I'm afraid firstly that you'll get there before me and secondly that if I put something up, you'll overwrite it when you upload......Can I suggest that you divide the work up more formally: either do the site in shifts: you do mon/wed/fri, Drew do Tue, I do Thu etc... or that you assign stories to different reporters. then we can either use the Blog to make sure we don't over-write each other, or we use this thread to say: "I'm writing an article, don't upload until it's there" or we post them on the board, and you cut & paste to the site.

2. We need to do better cross-linking: when a story goes up, we need a post on the relevant thread to say so, and we need a link to the relevant thread from the site.

Thanks Rob

I've been meaning to post a cry for help on doing the news articles for several days now

I think the shifts idea sounds good, we've got: Sally, you, Drew, Matt, Arka and DavidB who've agreed to help aswell as me of course.

How about this: I'll do Tuesday and Thursday, you do Monday, Drew and Matt do Wednesday, Arka and David do Friday and Sally does all articles on Andy Murray, Tim Henman and Greg throughout the week.
The weekend is generally the busiest time and not all of us may know what we're doing in advance so maybe each Friday we split up the articles between the 6 of us. What do you think ?

How about using the blog for the homepage articles, that looks good. I'm going to set up an interviews page to post the special interviews we've done after they pass off the homepage. Maybe we could post special interesting press articles on the lower ranked Brits on there aswell ?

One problem I'm having at the moment is deciding when to take articles off the homepage. For articles on matches, I can just transfer them to the "news" page after that day but for
exclusive articles (like the Baltacha one), interesting press articles (like the current one on Anna F in Tipton) and the interviews we do, I'm not sure how long to leave them on there ?

Also, the news page currently has about 30 articles on it and it might be slowing it down. I think it'd be an idea to set up two more archive news pages linked to that which we can use to split the articles up and that also gives us more of an archive.

Sheddie · administrator

Michael wrote:

Sorry if I have missed something but how come Noami Cavaday isn't playing anywhere for the next two weeks and Georgie is not playing the week after next.

I think it could be because Naomi's still limited to the number of senior tournaments she's allowed to play under ITF rules.

Not sure about Georgie, probably because the only 25K is in the States and the two 10Ks in Europe are on clay. I think she's taking two weeks off to train before playing a 25K in Belarus.

Sheddie · administrator

john wrote:

Apologies if this is included somewhere on the site, but do you think it's a good idea to have links to official live scores for all the tournaments involving Brits each week?

I think that would be a good idea, something I need to look into

imoen · Admin: Moderator+Tennis Legend

ultimateshedman wrote:

but for exclusive articles (like the Baltacha one), interesting press articles (like the current one on Anna F in Tipton) and the interviews we do, I'm not sure how long to leave them on there ?

I suggest you leave them on for a week when they're special articles.

The website looks very good still

I'm enjoying reading it and it's great that you're getting so many quotes. If you share the article writing (and you really should) then you need to decide how to continue the quotes, eg if it's a women's tournament and Nigel Sears is offering comments each day are you going to pass those comments onto whoever is writing the article that day or are you going to let them get directly in contact with Nigel? Just something to think about.

Keep up the good work!

RobC · All-time great

news stories added to main page: San Jose doubles preview/ Update from Juniors in Bolivia/ Melbourne 25K.

also archived a few articles to "news"

imoen · Admin: Moderator+Tennis Legend

news articles are very good Rob.

Just one thing, I don't know who posted the article about Hutchins but the photo is of Goodall and not Ross. you either need to say so or post a picture of Hutchins (I have one of the two of them here:

). Ta.

Keep up the excellent work guys!