The poll above was on a website with the state’s name. A different URL is the official website of the state’s racquetball association.
Questions that prompted this post for me:
1) I would consider all of these things as racquetball news,
a) Tournament announcements
b) Tournament results / reviews / recaps
c) League announcements / results / reviews / recaps
d) Clinic/training announcements / reviews / recaps
so why are these separate categories to be checked in your list which prioritizes only 4 things?
2) If you are looking for a tournament schedule, particularly a sanctioned tournament schedule, would you bother doing any more work than embedding the state’s R2 page? The R2 page is already the first hit in a Google search for the state name and ‘racquetball’. Definitely you would want to cover unsanctioned events separately, but duplicating the R2 work is just a frustration that will be abandoned quickly. State associations fail to even keep their Facebook events caught up with their R2 sanctioned events.
Get your tournament calendar for free by embedding:
https://www.usaracquetballevents.com/ {state name, lower case} /future.asp
i.e. https://www.usaracquetballevents.com/texas/future.asp
Embedded in the Austin page, here:
http://atxrball.com/tournaments
3) Why would you ever want a photo / video gallery that was separate from coverage of an event? Are you looking for random photos of players doing stuff? Photos and videos should be part of your news stories. No one is going on the web looking for just a photo. They need the story around the photo as well.
After checking the boxes on the form, I added some comments to that field as well.
Social media! Use it to keep the website updated, new, and easily refreshed by information you are already sharing elsewhere. There are a huge (and I mean really, really huge) number of racquetball players that 1) don’t use social media at all and 2) if they use social media, it is only for family so they won’t see your social posts anyway.
If you are using a tool like WordPress ( as I will continue to endorse 🙂 ), you can easily embed your feeds from those social media sites. This is a two fold benefit. It helps those players that aren’t on social media find the information that you shared. It helps players that are on social media to know where you are and how to follow you. I don’t believe in simply putting the Facebook/Instagram/YouTube/Twitter icons on your site to be of any demonstrable value. Take that tiny extra step and show your social posts directly on your site.
Examples of a Facebook timeline:
http://dailyracquetball.com/facebook/
http://bobbyhornrball.com/facebook/
http://cristiamayarball.com/facebook/
Examples of a Twitter timeline:
http://bobbyhornrball.com/twitter/
http://cristiamayarball.com/twitter/
If you are going to use YouTube to host your videos, embed those in the site. For YouTube, it is as simple as keeping a playlist, and adding every new video to that playlist, and then your website is always up to date.
What are your thoughts on the survey, and would you like to have the link so that you can give them your comments as well?
