A couple of weeks ago I volunteered to take over the running of the website of the cycling club I belong to: The Hereford Wheelers.

Currently the site is fairly simple to look at, principally being built as a series of static pages using Front Page.

Some of the pages do not tend to change from one week to the next, but other pages are far more active. During the spring/summer racing season, the events programme, news and race results pages require updates on a weekly basis (more so if the results for the various points tables come in in dribs and drabs).

The time-trail results are multi-faceted: First you have the actual results of the event, consisting of the starting number, rider details (name and club), and their completion time. Bolted-onto this is the general point’s allocation (100 points for 1st place, 99 points for 2nd place etc).

Next is the overall points table. This consists of all the riders and their accumulated points total, order by descending points.

Next is the Ladies points table. Similar to above, but only featuring the ladies!

Next is the handicap-ranking table. The calculation to this is currently a mystery to me, but simply provides a list of rider names and a handicap-points total.

Next up is the Vet’s times table. Vet’s being the Veterans. To qualify you need to be over 40. This provides a list of all the club veterans, complete with a minus/plus time factor (whose calculation also is shrouded in mystery).

Finally there is a table providing side-by-side comparison of the rider’s times for each race completed in the season.

I’d taken over during week 3 of the race season, and my first task was to update the results table from the Thursday evening time-trial. This provided my first challenge!

Most of the results get emailed to me by late on Thursday night. For my first week, I carefully forwarded on the email to my work email account so that I could pick it up at work on the following morning (Friday).

The first issue was that the internet policy at the client site I work at prevented me accessing the host of the Wheelers site (1and1 Internet). A bit of a show-stopper. So I had to wait until I got home that evening before I could take a look at accessing it.

The next issue to beset my endeavours was that I do not have Front Page. So I had to convert the supplied XLS and Word files (containing the various point’s tables) to HTML. I eventually hand-edited the htm files using a simple text editor and then uploaded them via FTP, rather than use the ghastly host control panel.

Over the last couple of weeks I have now refined and perfected the art. I have broken away from the previous format for displaying the various points tables by holding them in separate htm files, and providing links from the main weeks results page. I now wait until the Friday evening before performing the site updates. I can prepare some of the pages in advance, ready to receive the tables, so this helps to streamline the workflow.

I have also located an excellent web-based utility for speedily converting Word and XLS tables into HTML tables, without generating huge swathes of unnecessary CSS style and SPAN statements (anyone who has used MS Word to write HTML will know exactly what I am on about).

This brings me (eventually) to the main point of this ramble. I am now in a position to start looking into a web site revamp. I have agreed with the club that we will maintain the current look and feel of the site for the duration of the race season. No point trying to overhaul the system whilst updates will be coming thick and fast. Much better to look at the revamp during a quiet time – essentially after the race season is over, but before the Winter turbo training sessions kick in.

As part of any revamp, I would like to move the site away from 1and1. Ideally I’d like to drag the domain over to my own company hosting area, where I would have complete root-level access to engineer a site from the ground up, and have a good degree of control over its accessibility and availability.

In an ideal world I need to move away from static pages, and head towards some form of Content Management System (CMS). The first one that springs to mind is of course WordPress itself. I know other CMS’s are available, but WordPress is the one that I know very well, so it’s probably worth exploring this route first.

So as a side project for the coming months, fitting in between holding down a consulting business (and also slotting in between cycling!) I need to mock up some versions of a new Hereford Wheelers website on one of my development laptops, so that when the time comes I can take it to demo to the club committee to gauge their reaction and opinions.

We shall see what becomes of this.