Badminton Near Warrington

I’ve been telling anyone who’ll listen that having a web presence is free and simple, and doesn’t need to be opaque to the search engines. It can be standards compliant, easy to find, and well structured. You can change the content as and when you like. You can add pictures and so on. And it’s all free.

A recent example of this is one of my preferred Badminton Clubs’ website – my company builds websites professionally, so we’re not in the habit of giving them away. But these are custom jobs, for firms that need reliable websites which often generate far more money than they cost. But a small club doesn’t need the fine control of a commercial organisation. So I pointed Halton Badminton‘s chief chap Bob Redmond, to wordpress.com and we spent a couple of hours together as I showed him the ropes.

And now the site’s there and the search engines will soon pick it up. Hopefully it’ll soon attract the traffic it deserves – these are great clubs for anyone interested in badminton around Widnes, Runcorn or St Helens – and a fair few folk from Warrington turn up as well. For more details head to http://haltonbadminton.wordpress.com

Hillclimb and Sprint Photography

I don’t often mention other sites, but that’s more because I’m lazy and don’t do my research, rather than any intent to ignore.

But I can’t ignore Gary Thomas’s new sprint and hillclimb photo site. He takes some cracking pictures of the sprint scene and shows them off at his photo site yourftd.com where you can also order prints and electronic copies.

I’ll admit to some involvement though – my web design firm Interconnect IT was lightly involved. Unusually this wasn’t our more typical and more complex implementations – instead we installed suitable off the shelf open source software, created a nice logo, gave Gary some instruction, and sent him on his way. Keeps the budget simple, if you stick to things that have already been done. It’s not been without it’s problems, however, and I soon learned that a large collection of images – all of which need some server manipulation – can take up enormous server resources. It’s not Gary’s fault, this – I honestly thought it would be no problem given the usual performance of our sites. But with that and sniffpetrol.com hammering our machines I realised it was time to upgrade our server. So you should see some rip-snorting performance on this and our other websites – we now have a shiny new machine which we no longer share with other web firms. Woo!

I’m going to be cheeky and include a sample image from Gary’s site down below, just to show you the quality of his work:

Photo from yourftd.com

Aintree Sprint Report, 8th September 2007

A bit slow putting this one up, but it needs doing!

It was an unusual day for me, in part, because I’d not really expected to be competing! I’d really given up on this season – with a shortage of funds and time while I continue getting my business on its feet (it’s at http://www.interconnectit.com visit it, it’s great!) I’d cut back my motorsport involvement to the very basics. However, before I’d made that decision, back in April, I’d already entered for this event.

Completely forgotten, the event drew closer and I only realised I was entered when I was volunteered for passenger rides to Juice FM prize winners! I responded that I’d be happy to help, but couldn’t as I didn’t think I was there. Reassurances that I’d entered quickly came back so, with just a week left, I quickly tried to get my car working and ready for motorsport!

The day itself was one of those where I never felt as on form as I should. A lack of circuit time certainly didn’t help, but I quickly set at 53.01 time on my first run. Problem was, I couldn’t really improve on that. David Marshall in his potent 205 GTI was all over my times and a win wasn’t assured. Gary Thomas, who I can usually rely on to push me in this class had moved to mod-prods due to running semi-slick tyres. Even he, however, failed to break his own Elise record in spite of the great tyres. I can only assume that the windy conditions didn’t favour the lightweight and relatively low powered Elise. Eventually, on the last run, I managed to pip David Marshall by 5/100ths of a second! On the final ‘fun run’ I went quicker again, experimenting with some lines and being aggressive with the kerbs, but still over a second slower than my personal record.

The picture below, incidentally, was taken by Gary. He’s now making available his images through a quick and simple online gallery application I helped him set up. Online photo galleries can be something of a nightmare, especially if you’re trying to sell the pictures – eCommerce systems don’t work well with large numbers of images, and Photo Gallery systems don’t do eCommerce very well. However, in spite of that I think we did a nice wee site, and the pictures are great – if you want photographs from sprints and hillclimbs, he’s got some great examples at yourftd.com.

Lotus Elise and Dave Coveney by yourftd.com