On April 30, 2010 Poplar Creek Golf Club launched its redesigned website to its membership. Some of the features of the website resulted from feedback from the members wishing for more interactivity.
Q. What are the new features?
A. There are two categories of additional features:
New Additions
- Quick Shout Out – the home page has a box for quick club news and info on our next tournament
- Member Spotlight – the home page has a box showcasing…
– Random member from the Gilliam Points List
– Flight winners from the last tournament
– Other announcements such as Match Play Champion and Club Champion
- Glliam Points List – New look with sortable columns
- Polls – a quick vote on a hot topic of the moment
- Links – links to some of the standard golf websites and to other sites of general golf interest
- Do You Know The Rules? – a rules scenario with the official USGA rule along with a PCGC commentary
- Photo Gallery – the club's pictures in an "album" format
- Golf Scorecard – scorecard and course info are available
- Scoring Report – tournaments now have a scoring report showing the results of the entire field
Beta Additions (may be taken down later):
Q. I noticed that some of the posts allow for the visitor to leave comments at the end of the posts. Why only some posts and not others?
A. Everyone will have an opinion on every article we post but this site is not a worldwide blogging website. It's a simple website serving a membership of several hundred local golfers as well as other interested parties including potential new members.
Also an annoyance is that other websites will attempt to post comments which are in fact spam.
So for the time being, public commenting is being limited; however, it is up to the author whether or not to allow comments on their posts.
Q. Speaking of allowing the membership to make comments, are there any plans on having a forum where a member can login and post a question or comment?
A. None at the moment. Besides a forum may not get much use with a small user base such as ours. A member will quickly lose interest if they eagerly post a question and not get a response for days or none at all. There has to be a steady stream of activity to make a forum successful.
Q. The content on the new site is for only the past year. Where are the prior years?
A. The old site's content is still available at www.pcgc.net/oldsite.
The old site has a lot of content for the prior year's tournaments; however, the content may not be ported over to the new site because the membership is usually interested only in the current year with only a peek or two at the prior years.
Q. What is the "Gilliam Random Spotlight" that is on the home page's Member Spotlight?
A. A random player is pulled from the Gilliam Points List whenever the home page is visited. Refresh the page and a different player appears.
The fun part is seeing someone you know and funner still if you see your name.
Q. Speaking of Gilliam Points List, there is a Gilliam Points List – Historical page showing some of the prior years. How did that come about?
A. Usually the only thing that a member wants to see from a prior year's tournament season is the points list. They are not so concerned with prior year schedules or tournament results.
So for the benefit of the members, we are showing the past few years of our points list on the new website.
The technical challenge was how to pull the prior years together and to present them in an efficient and easy-to-use format. The result is the tabbed interface where you simply click on the year to reveal the results.
However, the page's performance is not operating at a satisfactory level. The page can take a few seconds to load because it is pulling so much information from the database. This is not so noticeable on a fast computer but the page feels a little "sluggish" on slower computers.
The page may have to be trimmed down at some point.
Q. How do I contact the Directors? The Directors page has the email addresses listed but the Contact page has checkboxes.
A. Yes, it is confusing which method to use. Feel free to use either method. Sending an email from your email account is perfectly fine. Using the form is perfectly fine. It's your choice.
The completed Contact form will be sent to the chosen Director(s) via their email address.
We are trying out the Contact form to see how it works. We may scrap it if it becomes too confusing.
Q. The website doesn't operate that well on my computer.
A. Lots of testing has been done to ensure that the website operates in the most common situations.
The website has been tested on…
- Multiple browsers – Internet Explorer (6, 7 & 8), Firefox, Safari, Chrome
- Multiple operating systems – Windows 2000, XP and 7, Linux and Mac
- Fast and slow computers
Also, this website makes use of Adobe Flash and Javascript for its interactive features so you should be sure your browser is enabled for both.
To those of you using Internet Explorer 6 (also known as IE6), you really should consider upgrading to the current version or to another browser. The main reason is for security. The second is that IE6 cannot handle some of the display rendering and interactivity that a lot of websites use. Our website has been tested in IE6 and for the most part it functions just fine; however, there are some display items that don't render correctly because IE6 cannot handle the newer CSS standards. IE6 has been around for a long time but it's time to retire it. Please upgrade!!
Q. How do I know which browser I am using?
A. Most browsers have their version number under the Help menu similar to Help – About Firefox. Further, the same Help menu should have an option to Check for Updates. Internet Explorer does not have this option. It receives its updates via Windows Update (Tools – Windows Update).
Q. Can a member send a suggestion?
A. Yes. There is a Feedback link at the bottom of every page.
