The overall aim of the snooker website is to provide
any UK Snooker League with a highly detailed snooker
website instantly
This website is probably the most
professionally designed snooker league website on
the Internet, because it provides any snooker
league with an extremely well designed website instantly.
How does it do this? It has been carefully designed
to accommodate any league scoring system, from
leagues with draws to singles leagues. The site also
stores historical data, in that people can look back
at the very detailed information from previous seasons,
once an administrator adds a seasons information into
the database it is there forever.
To get started a representative from the snooker league
is given a username and password, they log into the
site and enter all their snooker leagues data using
simple and easy to use web forms, including league
snooker competitions. They can also upload pictures
of snooker
presentations etc, email everybody who has registered
their email address at the single click of a button,
and all league players can discuss issues using the
snooker forum. The amount of time the site would save
an administrator is unsurpassed, as all data is securely
stored in a database.
The Kidderminster Snooker League has opted to take
out the domain www.kidderminstersnooker.com
that aliases the League Snooker website and redirects
to the Kidderminster Snooker League home page within
this site. If any leagues wish to take up this option
dont hesitate to contact
me.
This community was originally developed for an M.Sc
Computing dissertation, extensive research was carried
out involving 49 players and administrators from accross
23 UK snooker leagues to produce a highly valuable
tool that can be utilised by any UK Snooker League.
Below is an excerpt from the research.
The snooker league administrator
is the key figure for the success of the online community
as they are currently responsible for collating
all snooker league information; because they
are the central repository for all league information
it seems logical that they become responsible for
updating information in the Snooker Database
on a regular basis.
The many hundreds of snooker league administrators
along with the snooker league committees themselves
will need to be persuaded to use the community as
a tool for storing, retrieving
and manipulating their snooker leagues information
if the community is to be successful. This can be
achieved for two reasons; one being that the most
typical method currently being used by snooker league
administrators to store information is antiquated,
several administrators interviewed recorded all the
data in a 1000 line snooker
spreadsheet. When they were observed going
about their duties many had difficulties using the
snooker spreadsheet, they scrolled endlessly in an
attempt to locate the information that needed updating,
and cut and paste teams above or below each other
as they moved up or down the snooker league table.
Whilst performing the rearrangement of teams in the
league table, teams were often placed in the wrong
position in the league table, this mistake that was
witnessed was evident in the local newspaper the following
week, interestingly players in the opposing team that
our team played against that week remarked that the
league table was incorrect.
This snooker website is database
driven, thus the storing, retrieving and manipulating
of information is much more sophisticated than that
of a snooker spreadsheet and should reduce the mistakes
like those mentioned above, and ultimately reduce
the workload of the snooker league administrators.
Every league administrator has described entering
their leagues data as easy and simple, read their
testimonials for
yourself. The other reason is that if snooker league
administrators record all the league information online,
then that information will be readily available
to every participant within their snooker league
and be much more up-to-date, thus solving the lack
of information problem that the league participants
complained about in the survey results.
Snooker League Participants
Based on our extensive participation within two separate
snooker leagues in the UK, we possess a good understanding
of the tasks that league participants perform, these
being to access information concerned with their particular
snooker league, at present the participants access
the information via the local press, snooker websites,
word of mouth and possibly on club notice boards.
The types of information that participants wish to
find need to be mapped into the online community;
participants would like to see up-to-date snooker
league tables, news, results, fixtures, rules, snooker
player statistics and various team and individual
cup information.
