Guest Post: Creating a Team Website

Jeff Moree, a high school pitcher at Carmel Catholic, in Illinois, submitted this article on creating a baseball team website. While it doesn't specifically address pitching, I do feel it's a good baseball-related topic that may be helpful to regular readers of this blog who may be thinking about creating their own team website. As always, I encourage you to submit your articles, details here.

I am a 17 years old, senior in high school, starting varsity pitcher on my high school team. I love baseball, and I love the internet, so I figured I would create my team a website. We did not have one, and I feel that a site would be a great place to post the progress of our season as we advance to the State Playoffs. Creating an effective, informative, and professional site is not easy, but by following a few key steps, anyone can do it. Here is my experience, tips, and logic behind my site.

Starting Off

The first step is purchasing a domain name. There are two ways to go about this, depending on how you create your site (details on this in next step). I purchased my domain name through NetworkSoultions.com. This cost me $10 for my www.CorsairBaseball.com domain. Not a bad price!

Creating the Site

There are many ways to do this, but I will only go into detail on how I did it. I do not have much experience when it comes to web design and coding. All I had was a plan, and motivation. I searched Google for a good “free” website builder. I came across www.Weebly.com. I set up an account, and began working on my site.

I used Weebly to create my website. It has a very simple layout, consisting of drag and drop elements. For example, if I want a text box, I drag a text box onto the page. If I want a mini web forum, I drag a mini web forum onto the page. This is the simplest site creator I have seen, yet it can yield very professional looking sites when done correctly. The site is free to use, and the domain name that you are supplied with for free is www.yoursitename.weebly.com. You have the option to buy a domain name through Weebly, or use your own. I used my own, since it was cheaper. Once transferred, my site was up and running on www.CorsairBaseball.com!

What to Include On The Site

On my site, I have a home page with general info about the team, a player profile page, a game summary blog, updated schedule, conference standings, and an image gallery. All of this is done using the drag and drop method.

What Not to Include

When I first created the site, I included a web forum for “Team Discussion”. Unfortunately, some people thought it would be funny to abuse the forum, which led to me taking it down. If you are going to add a forum, EVERYONE will need to agree to use it responsibly. I even went as far as paying the $4 a month to allow password protected pages, but someone got the password and still posted inappropriate posts.

I hope that this article has helped someone with their website creation. If anyone has any questions about how I did anything on my site, why I did it, etc, feel free to submit a contact form on the home page of my team site mentioned above. Thanks for reading!