Cheshire Hockey Association Publicity/Website Officer-Report for 2005-06
During the last year the county web site has continued to be developed as a prime source of information for, and communication with, both clubs and individuals. Information made available included:
Cheshire Constitution
Meeting schedules
Minutes of CHA management committee
Minutes of Cheshire Development Group
AGM reports and Association accounts
Fixture schedule, results and honours from schools and youth hockey
Cup draws and results for both Men’s and Women’s cup competitions
Contact details for all officials
Announcements re coaching and umpiring courses
Miscellaneous announcements re events from English Hockey and the North
The general trend, starting with English Hockey, is to more and more use the web and email as the prime source of communication with clubs and their members. Accordingly work was also done on the underlying site structure to facilitate future enhancements and to hopefully make it more accessible and useful to all. The site was moved to its own hosted site which should give greater flexibility in developing the site. On re setting up the site the opportunity was taken to remove out of date information and links. If however anybody feels they have lost a useful facility or set of data then please let me know. The way of displaying individual contact details was enhanced in a pilot using the ladies league page. This new approach allows the displaying of full details, postal address, email phone etc in a way that hopefully protects against spam harvesting and search engine robots. It is intended to apply this approach to all contact details shown on the site in the future.
There is the more general question of putting up contact information for all the association clubs (this was a victim of the above mentioned cull on out of date information). As all member clubs must now be registered with FixtureLive can I encourage you all to maximise your use of this facility by putting up all your club and team details and keeping these up to date during the season. The intention is to complement this by putting contact details on the county site. This will include links to the relevant FixturesLive page plus detailed contact information selected from the county handbook. Exactly what will be put up will depend on how much FL is used but will most likely be full details for the club secretary and fixtures secretary. This information will be displayed in the same way as described above for the committee plus the method will be enhanced by encrypting any data held on the site (more details on this will be given on the web site). However if anybody does not want some or all of their contact details to appear on the site or would like to discuss the issue then can they let me know. However can they please ensure we have at least one contact email address. Club secretaries should also ensure that when collecting club information for the handbook they confirm with individuals that they are happy with this.
The number of visits to the site during the last year has been about 10,000 which compares favourably with other county sites but is no where near the number that visit leagues sites during the season. While this is to be expected I would like to improve on this number and so would welcome any suggestions as to information or facilities people would like to see on the site and which you think would encourage regular usage.
Peter Wharton
The information collected will be used for the organisation and operation of Cheshire Hockey in particular and of hockey in general. It will be published in full in the Association Handbook which is distributed to relevant parties including English Hockey, the Northern Counties and member clubs. A subset of this information, specifically, individuals contact information, may also be published on the web and/or made available in electronic format. In this case it will be stored and made available according to the guidelines of the Data Protection Act. Details of this policy will be published on the county web site. Should it be required that some or all of an individual's information not be published in this way then it should be indicated on submission or as per instructions published on the web site.