New website for USA water ski

[Horton]

@JeffSurdej I pretty much try to support whatever you do because I think you do far more good than any of your predecessors in my lifetime but this website thing is ridiculous. I'm guessing with a little from a programmer I could convert the entire site into one of the off-the-shelf CMS systems in a week.

 

Correction - I assume this is actually not something @JeffSurdej had real control of.

[RichardDoane]

@JeffSurdej - let's start a "gofundme" to take @Horton up on his offer. What's a week of "Horton-time" worth ? Can't be more that a few grand. I'm in for $100. to get the website-fixing-ball rolling !

[Horton]

@RichardDoane my rate is $70 per hour. I need to review the data structure first and would also maybe need some budget for a programmer depending on what we found. In the end it's mostly just content management. There's a dozen off-the-shelf tools to do it. BallOfSpray was built 100% without the assistance of a programmer. It's just not rocket science. I'm sure the iframes for the ranking list required some additional expertise but otherwise there was nothing fancy in the old website.

[JackQ]

The old website is actually still operational if you know how to get in, i use it to check registration Status, rankings etc. That is why I saw restore original site now, pick up the pieces and try again. Not my 1st rodeo, time to restore capability to your clients and not attempt to save face from a failed attempt and make a bad situation worse.

[RichardDoane]

@JackQ - that is good advice, sometimes we learn more from failed attempts than success

[JeffSurdej]

I appreciate everyone's feedback, all I can say at this point is lets do what we can to make it better and I will also see about reverting back to old site on pages until fixed. I know HQ has already done that for a few main pages so they are willing to do so. I cant tell you how much it would help to enter your issues on this google sheet as many have done already https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/135vMmVLc1bh6HsXnh8hLohpkHP-dX2OmVkqU3gFMrlk/edit#gid=0

 

I'm more upset that this is the platform the the USOC provides for 49 NGB's. You would think it would be better. A decision was made about 3 years ago to go this route, we could either pay to rebuild a new site or take advantage of being part of the USOC and not only get a free website but get paid $55k a year for using their platform. I dont think any of us thought it would be this difficult. Financially it seemed like the right choice at the time. Most of our issues on the new site have to due with fact this "iframes" thing which is how all our sanctioning and rankings must live on teamusa without re-writing all the code. We've put ourselves in quite a bind by having volunteers develop sanctioning and rankings and OLR, not a bind as we would not have any of it without people like Mark Crone, Dave Clark, Jim Meis, Dave allen and others. I can not even begin to tell you what all us skiers owe these guys, but at some point here we have to update the programming language and get it out of the hands of 1 volunteer. Our rankings is the most complicated thing you can imagine, you should see the behind the scene coding that goes into making all our unique situations fit.

 

HQ next moved is to move our membership system to the same system USA hockey uses, the key here is it wont be in our hands to code or update, if new version comes out or a browser changes, or security measures are put into place they get updated on the spot. We are basically using an SAS.

 

Appreciate all the feedback on this, I hate that the new site has not gone smoothly. Our members deserves better. but we will get it fixed.

 

[skierjp]

I still use the old site for scheduling Promo Boats and checking the number of skiers that have registered if they used online registration.

[Phil]

Ithink the new site absolutely terrible , i used to go on the old site a few times a week but this one is so bad i do not even want to go on it !