My Broughty Athletic webmaster days are over!

I have loved doing the Broughty Athletic website, it’s simply been great fun.

After nearly five years of maintaining a website – http://www.broughtyathleticfc.com – for my local Junior football club I yesterday handed over the website’s ownership, and the responsibility for maintenance and development of the site, to the club itself. Incidentally “junior” in Scotland has nothing to do with children’s football, it’s the description applied to most of the country’s semi-professional adult football.

I have loved doing the Broughty Athletic website, it’s simply been great fun, but I never saw it as a stand-alone activity. To be truly effective I believed the website had to be part of a multi-strand effort of publicising the club in order to attract bigger crowds. Website apart, I was also keen to encourage the club to diversify its income streams. I didn’t become a member of the club’s committee at any time during the five years but I tried my best in other ways to convey these sentiments.

Sadly the website did remain stand-alone; it was never part of an integrated publicity strategy. Perhaps that’s simply too much to expect from a volunteer-run junior club, unrealistic on my part. What is certain is that over the period there has been no increase in the number of supporters attracted to Whitton Park from the sizeable local community and in my opinion the club’s income at the time of writing is less diversified than ever.

In short, none of my personal targets for the website – or the club in general – were achieved. So not exactly a success story then! As my sixty-fifth birthday was approaching towards the end of November of this year and my wife is soon to be retired it seemed as good a time as any to move on from the sometimes inconvenient, if self-inflicted regime, of providing daily updates for the site.

In the last three weeks I have almost completely dismantled the site before restoring, and in some cases, improving the site’s content. The club have been given what I think can fairly be described as a very detailed set of handover documents and the website’s “Phase Two” begins today.

Perhaps this new blog will provide me with a refreshingly different alternative to maintaining a website.