The School is making some improvements to help the communications and information availability on school related websites, including managing the sports websites. The main reasons (this is my summary) for this are:
·         Continuity – websites can be great, until the one person who knew how to do it leaves, changes jobs, runs out of time, etc. Such as has happened with soccer this year. Moral – you cannot rely on volunteers.
·         Consistency – where there is sufficient interest and enthusiasm, the formats and styles should have at least some consistency and conformity with the SKC and related sport etc. websites.
·         Currency – website will constantly be updated with current information, as it will be coordinated by someone who is paid to do it. No longer relies on someone telling someone else who has another day job to load something onto the website.
·         Control – while this has not been raised as a concern in respect to our website, there remains the risk of abuse of a site that could tarnish the SKC name – even though the website is currently flagged as independent.
 I have had a look at the new SKC Rugby website, and while it is still under development, I think this is going to be a good move for rugby communications. The Link is below:
http://web.stkevins.vic.edu.au/co-curricular/sport/rugby/Rugby.htm
 

The appearance will be tailored slightly so that it has a rugby photo in the banner position, with “Rugby News” in the banner title. The menu options will be customised to suit our recommendations, which would include direct links to:
Ø       FAQs, and any other key information that ought to be there.
Ø       Rugby photos, which are now going to be part of the SKC photo gallery, but the album structure will be much better organised than we have been able to do it in our current rugby website.
Ø       Rugby calendar, which will form part of the existing school calendar, but will need a search on “rugby” to show only rugby events,
Ø       Results, part of the overall sports results, but link will point directly to rugby results
Ø       Fixture, as above
Ø       Archives – possibly pointing to our existing website?
Ø       What else?   The website administrator advises that it is possible to add any menu additions that we might wish.
 

I will summarise what I think is going to be the impact on us.
A.    Continuity will be a major benefit for medium and longer term.
B.    tighter control over match reports will be achieved, given each Coach will write the match report, and the Head of Sport will be “encouraging” the updates
C.    photos will be better managed
D.   We can still provide information, broader rugby community updates, and other news – simply be emailing to the web administrator (Anna Hayes), and she will post it.
E.    No downtime – it is part of the main SKC website, and errors and problems will be corrected by staff
F.    More professional approach
G.   No risk of “escapes” of inappropriate commentary/photos, and resultant embarrassment
H.    We do lose the feeling of independence, and a degree of personal control. However, my view is that this is probably a good thing. It was always a problem to drag match reports out of the boys and coaches.
 

Actions required:
Questions remain about the following:
1)       How we archive what we have from last two or three years.
2)       Process of guidance of Age Group coordinators for photo submission.
3)       How we restrict the archived photos to only a few of the better ones. In some cases there are over 40 just for one game! With 8 or 9 teams, and 10 or more games, the number of photos is currently unmanageable.
4)       What we do about existing website. We could offer it to the SKC rugby old boys and allow them to operate it if they wished. If so, we lose complete control, and place a lot of it in the hands of others who have their own issues and time constraints.

If anyone has any feedback on the above, please feel free to email me with your thoughts. pauldeg@optusnet.com.au