Though we are still in the middle of the summer doldrums – from any Linfield sports fan’s point of view at least – the sports information office has been working steadily behind the scenes in July and August gearing up for another great sports year.
The initial competitions of the fall are Sept. 1 when the soccer and cross country squads are in action. The first football game is Sept. 12 at home against nationally ranked Hardin-Simmons. Football season tickets are still available, and for $48, Linfield football remains a bargain investment compared to Division I, where it now costs more than that for just a single-game ticket.
I have been hunkered down in the office, working on the many details and decisions that come with creating a new look for our athletics Web site. Rather than going the route of hiring an outside firm to create a site from a standard template, we decided to keep the design process mostly “in-house.” I say mostly, because we did have some graphics assistance from Hinmon Agency here in McMinnville. Company president Dan Hinmon, and designers Sally and Rick Kennedy collaborated with myself, Linfield Webmaster Jonathan Pierce, as well as Dan Preston of Enrollment Services and Jodi Kilcup from College Relations. The size of the group was just right to lob ideas and overall college objectives back and forth. Yet not so large that the process got bogged down by too much input.
Nearly a full year in development, the new site is still a few weeks away from making its debut. We are building the site on our existing database infrastructure, which Jonathan and I developed (along with student programming phenom Kam Figy) seven years ago. The platform still serves us well despite its age.
Think of the Linfield sports Web site like a car. Though it runs just fine, it could use a new paint job and some other parts replaced. It’s time to strip it down to the frame, add new fenders, trunk and hood. It’s a good time too to customize the interior and beef up the engine some more. We expect the end result should be nothing short of outstanding. In addition to Jonathan and myself, we’ve been relying on the programming talents of Linfield graduate Sean Ezell and current student Aaron Cody, both of whom are the real techno-geeks in this venture.
Some of the features of the new Web site include dedicated space for displaying videos, action photo galleries on every sport’s home page, better display of the master schedule, and slideshow presentation tools for the latest sports news.
Digging deeper, fans will find expanded historical and record book sections, as well as enhanced athlete bio display boxes.
Here’s a sneak peak. Leave your comments to let us know what you think.
We do not expect to launch the new site until all the bugs are ironed out, hopefully by the last week of August.
2 Comments
August 25, 2009 at 11:22 pm
Kelly,
I like the new web site. Very cool. Congrats! But, how come there’s not a link from the Linfield home page anymore?
August 25, 2009 at 11:31 pm
There is!
In the upper left corner labled ‘Linfield College Home’
Thanks for the comments.