Beaverlodgeblades.com

After a little bit longer then expected I’m finally proud to announce that I’ve finished up (for the most part) my latest website, beaverlodgeblades.com. Most my work is built on the free engine built from Wordpress and while it truly is a great platform it is lacking when it comes to a software solution for league/team websites. There are plugins out there available for it but why bend and try tweak something so it only works half as good as an already established statistics database program. Not to mention I couldn’t spend countless hours on a project that was ultimately free of charge because they employ me to coach.

Enter in Esportsdesk.

Esportsdesk (and Esportsdeskpro) are an established service providing stats tracking and other important league/team software. I stumbled across them earlier in the summer when I was trying to update the original Blades website which was hosted on a competitors of there’s called Goaline. I haven’t had a lot of time spent on esportsdesk but it already seems to me like it’s the right solution, in fact I knew it must be earlier in the summer seeing that it powered the BCHL website and a number of it’s member teams websites.

It certainly was a little more time consuming then I had originally planned for, more so for errors on my part and getting used to how the system is implemented. Needless to say judging from feedback I’ve received early on things seem to be positive. Having only to focus on the design made things a lot easier and thankfully with other work commitments needing to be finished it didn’t distract away from some of my other bigger projects (that have been completed as well).

Unfortunately there is still a lot that hasn’t been updated, most notably statistics from the past couple months which may take a little while. The good news is the NWJHL is on board with esportsdesk and will be tying there site stats tracking in with ours which will make life easier only having to update one gamesheet.

Roster page, schedule, some results and box scores, and a couple other pages are the only ones with any information as of right now but we plan on having the website fully functional and complete over the Christmas holidays.

Until then feel free to check out the website and give me some feedback. I will warn you all right now I haven’t had a chance to test it in anything less then Internet Explorer 8 so if you’re using anything lower then IE7 I suggest you upgrade and start using Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, or Apple’s Safari. If not you’ll just have to wait until I fix any glaring issues there may with using that dump of a browser Internet Explorer!

Visit the website at www.beaverlodgeblades.com
And feel free to follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/blodgeblades. I’ll be posting updates throughout the games as the year goes on.