We launched on the 24th March, and are proud to announce that we had 14,000 hits in the first month which is a great achievement given that the site was started only a day after I had the initial thought of starting a Villa website. What I wanted to cover in this article was a quick round up on progress, as well as officially announcing some of the new functionality The sections we have on the site as of today are:
The blog
Pretty self explanatory. For the most part the traffic for the site to date has been revolving around the blog with posts by myself, Eamon, Tim, and Tom. However, I have looked to develop so there are more areas now as detailed below. We are still looking for contributors, so please get in touch if you want to write for the site.
Forums
By popular demand we have installed a forum where you can discuss anything regarding the club (and other things) around the clock. This means that if you want to discuss transfer rumours, car sharing, or general sports, you can do so from the comfort of the site. The idea behind this is to allow fans to talk about anything without having to go through a process of article submission, as well as allowing submissions that wouldn’t constitute a whole article.
Chat
The idea for this was predominately intended for those who couldn’t get to matches, as well as to allow people on site to talk to each other about general items in real time away from areas such as blog comments, or the forum. I will create a blog post to arrange a time for people to meet on the site as I know people have been missing each other due to not knowing whether someone would be online. In order to give a clearer idea, at the bottom of the right hand section of the site is a “Users Online” section that tells you if anyone is in the chatroom at a glance.
News
The eagle eyed among you may have already noticed the “News” section in the top right, but I wanted to take some time to officially cover what it will bring to the site. Part of the ongoing development of this project is to turn this site into more than just a blog. In order to achieve this, the site will be syndicating content from multiple sources including the official site, Yahoo/Eurosport, and Sky Sports. If you have a site that you regularly visit which you want to be featured in the News section, please let us know and we will do our best to incorporate it. In order to ensure fairness, we will always ensure that our links point to the original article on the external site, rather than “news scraping” which is frowned upon.
*** NOTE *** – News is not currently working on the mobile site, but we are working to develop the mobile site over the course of May.
Mobile site
The site now has a mobile version that runs on iPhone, iPod Touch, Android devices, Blackberry touch screen devices, and many other mobile platforms. To use the mobile site, simply navigate to the normal URL and it will come up automatically. Over the course of the summer we will be looking to develop dedicated apps for both Android and iOS devices.
Translation
After seeing that the majority of our traffic comes from English speaking countries, it is interesting to know that the site is also regularly read in countries such as South Korea, Greece, Poland, Sweden, Denmark as well as many others with traffic coming from 58 different countries in total. In keeping with the demand for content form these regions, the website is now available in multiple languages. In order to translate the site into another language, you can do so by pressing “Translate” on the bar at the bottom of the site, and selecting the language you would like to read articles in. Easy, hey?
Text colour
In order to ensure the site is easier to read, I have changed text to black from the earlier light grey text colour after having several requests from users. If anyone has any issues, please do let me know.
User registrations
Due to wayward emails sending (or not sending as the case may be) emails to users on registration, the site now accepts registration via a form on the right of the site rather than self registration. Whilst this might seem like it is more long winded, it does at least guarantee that any new user will have access to the site via a human creating their login, rather than relying on an automated email. If anyone is having password problems, please use the form in the sidebar to the right of this post.
Moving forwards
Obviously moving forward, we will be looking to turn this site into a more rounded portal for everything to do with Aston Villa, encompassing all aspects of the club in order to foster a solid community for all fans. These include a fan exchange, store, and a few other things that will be announced in time. As always, if you do feel that anything else needs to be added, please contact me via email, or via the “Contact” section at the bottom of the site.
Thank you all for your support of the site, and here’s to the continuing success of Aston Villa Life as a portal for all fans of the club.
UTV!
Matt
*** NOTE *** – We seemed to have an outage on the server that happened between 7am and 3pm today (25/04/2011). If anyone had tried to log on to the site during this period but was unable, please let me know.
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