Make Sport Fun

Good free website systems

I'm asked sometimes about building websites, and it's a lot simpler to do now than most people realise.

There are two magic phrases to use when building websites. You might have come across them before.
•    Content Management System (CMS)
•    Cascading Style Shet (CSS)

Once you know that you have instantly more leverage when designing and building a site.

A content management system is a system which allows you to edit the content of your website easily.

A cascading style sheet is the look of your website, including fonts, colours, where the menu bar goes and more. The same site with the same content can be made to look two different ways with a cascading style sheet. These are sometimes also called themes, styles and more.

Systems I've used and can recommend include Typepad and LightCMS.

Typepad
•    Easy to set up
•    Free trial, then about £3-£7/ month depending on what package you choose.
•    originally designed for blogs, but works very well for simple websites
•    About £10/ month to run
•    Plenty of free designs
•    Can get custom designs too

LightCMS
•    free 3 page website
•    £30+ per month for bigger websites
•    some free designs, but only a few
•    £300 for new design

Free photos, posters and more

I've been busy working on tools to help you use Change 4 Life to encourage people to play more sport and do more activity - in the form of the Promoting Activity toolkit. Here's a summary of the latest improvements.

Online design tool
Probably one of the most exciting tools in the Promoting Activity toolkit. It allows anyone to quickly and easily create good-quality posters and flyers for free. It brings together the photo library, the Change 4 Life brand and the promotional messages (which were based on the latest research).

Photo library
We've got a free photo library of 200 photos. These are available for download, or as part of your posters or flyers through the online design tool.

National and regional activity calendars
We've uploaded information on big participation sports events and big elite sports events, both nationally and regionally. This should help you time your local activity promotion work more effectively.

Website redesign
Everything should be easier to find on the site since our website redesign in January.

Please try everything out, and let us know what you think by emailing john@makesportfun.com.

There's even more coming soon - so watch this space.

YouTube for sport

One good trick for getting people to use your sport’s group’s website is to add interactive materials for visitors.  One of the best ways to do this is to create a YouTube channel and upload video tutorials, short shows, commercials or other videos. 

Research predicts that growth of online video consumption will grow 72% each year between now and the 2012.  Lots of major websites and corporations use YouTube instead of posting their own videos.  Some companies have used the informal “channel” of YouTube to reach their consumers with fun spots that they would not want to pay to put on television.  BlendTech is a great example of a company that has leveraged YouTube for business success, posting wacky videos of the company’s CEO blending everything from garden rakes to iPhones.

To read the full article on how to use YouTube for sport please go to our How to guides section.