Will we make a craft website?
My wife wants to create a craft website! I think it would be a great idea, especially as she is soooo crafty – especially when it comes to drinking most of a bottle of wine without sharing it!
Lets hear it for the developers! Createanet are King!
Another week in the world of budding App Creator… and it’s all coming together. And as Hannibal in the ‘A Team’ would say ” I Love it when a plan comes together”!
My last blog entry I spoke at length about the need for a good, no great design team! Those damned creatives (of which I’m probably one!) and their design ethos! But what of the nuts and bolts guys, the stokers in the engine room creating all the heat and steam to make the engine run at full throttle under the hand of the captain.
Developers… you definitely can’t do it without them. And in Createanet (www.createanet.co.uk) I’ve got me some really good developers.
Thats not to say that the relationship was all sweetness and light at the start; but for understandable reasons. As an ‘ideas’ guy, a blue-sky thinker if you like, I can see the App, the project in my head. Every button, function, ‘call to action’ is there working just as the thousands of apps we all interact with everyday just work. We never consider the functionality, the flow, the fitness for purpose or the finer aspects of coding. For us, apps just work. The challenge was to marry up my passion with their knowledge and skills.
These guys know the hidden language of coding. Its probably a language that has touched more people than latin, mandarin or english but we just dont know it. Most people probably dont even know it exists. But i-Drills as an App wouldn’t exist without it.
At Createanet, MD Kevin King is the slick operator at the head of the organisation; the company was recommended by Selesti, through a recommendation to them. And it goes to prove the age old adage that the best recommendations are the personal ones. Leave aside the slick advertising campaigns or glossy brochures. Good people rarely have to sell themselves. Kevin made the time and effort to travel to the team hotel in Exeter to have an initial chat about the App idea – The Coaching App as it was referred to in the early days!
On his trusty iPad sat a number of Apps Createanet had, eh, created! Farm and Cottage Holidays had just been released and was downloading for fun; up to 10,000 a day!! Impressive numbers indeed.
Throughout the briefing process and scoping Kevin would be really insightful as to what could and couldn’t be done for the dough; and the added value they have created to date is excellent. I wanted the App out in June – but will have a far more polished product in November! Some of the little touches, the nuances of coding that have been brought to bear, means that time and money spent on the project will hopefully produce a product that we can ll be proud of.
Today I again saw the app in action and it gets slicker every time we see it. You want players – BOOM! Different colours of players – BOOM! Discs – BOOM!, Ladders – BOOM!
My design brief was ‘to be as fast as pen and paper or the coaches wont use it’! You’ll be able to decide for yourself in the next few weeks as to wether that has been achieved.
But I already know the answer!
i-Drills Website development – Selesti Style!
Design and development gather pace with updates and redesigns coming in more and more frequent intervals from Selesti Towers.Things are certainly picking up speed as we draw closer to the launch date in October.
If I’m not looking at template redesigns one minute, its webpage proofs the next, and then the App’s functionality itself. As an ‘ideas man’ it certainly pays to spend time trying to understand the technologies and professions at work, as when time is tight and costs money, you certainly dont want it to be wasted in a Class 101 on WebPage design.
Thats where I believe having good people; no excellent people and professionals on board is not only saving me time but (hopefully) saving me money. There’s no cotton wool surrounding the brief and design; I tell them what I want, they tell me if its a) within scope, 2) possible and 3) adds value to what the project is about. If theres a better way to do it, its explained and we make a decision. After all, its not only the ability I’m paying for but the opinion too.
When the project gets to certain milestones then ‘sign-off’ time arrives and that can be an important period! A little like getting married – its a commitment thing – once you say yes, changing your mind can be pretty expensive and may leave you looking a little foolish; best to have thought things through beforehand. And if everything is in place, you don’t want to disappoint the gathered throng by having stage-fright.
Having known the guys at Selesti for a good period of time (I had actually recommended a few people to them before I took the plunge myself) I knew that the quality of service and work would be high. Their portfolio of clients speaks for itself. They were my first and only choice for this project; not that I hadn’t had a few flirtations regarding other projects – some of which will hopefully bear fruit – but they were still relying on other pieces of the jigsaw to be in place first. Now that I’ve worked with them for a good year or so, they have shown their worth. Relaxed and encouraging when its appropriate, focussed and driven at game time.
Selesti are, to me, Ollie (MD) and Tom (Account Manager). Together they make a great team, they have each other’s back but there’s no comfort zone thats apparent to the client. Tom keeps everything moving, fielding calls, emails, texts etc with aplomb. To me, my app is the only project in the world, and the only one that Selesti should be working on; in reality its just one of a host of projects in the Selesti stable. I know thats the case but it never feels like that to me. Thats because Tom makes it that way. A+ Customer Service. If there’s difficulties with anything else, and only when needed, Ollie appears and together they make the difficulties go away.
So, if you’re in the market for an App or a website, Selesti should be your first port of call. Without their help, I’d be miles away from where I am now.
i-Drills to the market….
Another good week of development on the application and it was great in mid week to actually get our hands on a working version of the native app. So where do we go from here? Now our thoughts start to switch to the website and also the marketing strategy to get i-Drills as the number one coaching resource in the iTunes store!
As you may have read in my earlier blog posts the design of the website will be on an echo of the design of the itself , using many of the similar design features as you will experience when using the application itself. The visual features, the icons, the backdrop will all make you feel like you are interacting with the i-Drills application. The plan currently, is to have a number of different pages focusing visitors attention on the resources that they want to interact with.
With features on coaching, tactics, as well as practice drills themselves, in the future I hope that I-Drills becomes a community forum where there is an exchange of information between many many coaches. A transfer market if you will to allow coaches to exchange ideas freely and how to solve any problems that they might find within their clubs or teams. After all coaching is all about education and why shouldn’t coaches educate each other on aspects of the game they may not be strong on.
In terms of marketing we have a number of different strands that we wish to explore as we look to have a successful launch the application. As well as personal recommendations and professional testimonials I will also be looking to take advantage of other avenues in order to get the word out there about i-Drills. Initially our media contacts look quite healthy with most of the major media genres covered. Of course the Internet based names will be where a lot of the focus of attention will be.
I don’t mean to sound like I will be ruthlessly exploiting friends and colleagues in the right places but it would also appear foolhardy to ignore such strong relationships. And of course the more coverage we get the more the word will spread about the application and its benefits to coaches, especially in football as that is the launch product.
Later this week I will begin to make contact with many of those friends and start to make them aware of the imminent release of the i-Drills application. Whether in the role as a manager on coach I’m sure they would be enthused to hear of something new and innovative that will affect their work in a positive way. Time will tell on that one I suppose!
i-Drills Website design nears completion
I know when I’m fortunate to be working with good people; they standout amongst the mirth of averageness. In Ollie and Tom from @Selesti, I believe I’m working with some pretty sharp operators.
As we (me & Selesti) moved into web-design phase it was inspiring to see the creative ideas that I had fumbled and mumbled over the phone from near Carrington, Manchester in late May had transpired into a really cool looking home page design.
It perfectly compliments the App in feel and look and I cant wait to get creating content for it!
It’ll soon be there for you all to see at http://www.i-drills.com. If you haven’t already done so, please register for news on the site!
Dave
The Pad will be mightier than the pen
Last week was certainly an exciting week in the life of iDrills. The work that has been done on the app up to now behind the scenes has been well worth the wait to witness on screen. To see a functioning app in action certainly adds to the excitement of the whole project.
While i-Drills as a concept has been in my head for 15 months getting it into a working, functional app has taken a long, long time. From conceptual drawings to design and development it has taken hours and hours of work from many people.
While the pace of design and development can be somewhat frustrating, it would seem that time spent ruminating over little pieces of design will result in a far better user experience.
Born out of watching many coaches spend many hours creating training sessions and drills on pen and paper only for them to be tossed in the bin at the end of the day frustrated me. Good ideas are valuable resources were lost to the landfill every year. And this was often the case due to either a coach’s lack of confidence in relation to the computers or because of the lack of resources readily available to coaches. That is why from the outside I insisted on a user interface that was faster and more accurate than using a pencil or pen.
The user experience itself while not exactly unique will in the hands of an experience coach saved them so much time and you give them a much better resource than anything else currently available. The ability to create and consume content will be unique in this niche; most other applications either allow you to only create or only assume the content within.
While being given a video demonstration over Skype from Devon the UI certainly seems very slick and fast. It behaves exactly as I imagine it. And with those last few weeks of design and development to go, I am confident that iDrills will be a successful and addition to the coach’s armoury.
Slash and Burn – the new method of manager management.
Surprisingly in the time of season normally dominated by talk of player transfers, the paddy few weeks have seen a focus on a glut of transfers or managers to and from the dole queue, but there’s little shortage of people willing to jump right back into the frying pan.
There seems, at times, little justification in the reasons given by owners or chairmen as to why they choose to get rid of a manager. In days of yore, a manager’s position was rock solid; a time spent in the trenches as a coach, career defining chats in the boot room (or pub) and a guiding light in the form of a mentor all helped shape the style of a future boss. When the time was right the club would come calling and often promoted from within.
Those days are long gone.
Nowadays, players frantically look to complete their coaching qualifications towards the end of their careers when it dawns upon them that life could either get a) boring or b) hard work if they choose not to work in football. What job? Any job as long as I can remain in the environs on the football world. Many players become physios, fitness coaches or analysts – some take the traditional root as youth team coaches and then progress up through the ranks. However, for many, the eye is still on the big prize as Manager of the Football Club.
There are few careers, if any, where without any formal training or experience, the keys to the company’s safe are thrown to an amateur – however well intentioned he is. With a budget of millions, possibly, to spend and management of an often, highly qualified group of staff to manage, is it little wonder that so many first time managers fail. Over 50% never return to the hotseat.
Liverpool have this week bucked the trend by appointing from within, a man who embodies the ethos of the club a a whole. Kenny Dalglish has been there and done that in football and was brought up through the management methods of old. Now older and wiser, he has been charged with enlivening the Liverbird. A club which is on it’s knees has turned to it’s greatest son.
Will it work? Time, as they say, will tell. Ah time! The resource which,unfortunately, most managers today don’t get!
Give me a break? No chance!
One; One solitary match is all that we (Colchester United)
played in the whole of December 2010! The weather did for most of
sport in the UK and Ireland as well as large parts of the rest of
Western Europe. It has therefore reignited the debate over the
mid-season break for sport. There are many sides to this debate but
overwhelmingly there is agreement that it’s just too difficult to
decide when any such break should occur. Take for example the last
two years where there has been significant snowfall just prior to
Christmas. This would point to a mid-season break being ideally in
December. Five months done since pre-season and with five months of
the season to go, the changing of surface conditions during
training, as well as a chance for a little reconditioning as the
demands of the season become increasingly hard. Christmas
celebrated with everyone else. Not on your life the business men
would say – Christmas brings in bumper crowds, and a rare chance to
sell all that additional merchandise. It’s also a great time, if it
happens to your team, to get some real momentum running as the
games come thick and fast. So managers too would be only too keen
to get the games on. For players, I’m not too sure… On to
January; traditionally a month with the most disruptive weather. FA
Cup time in football! Preparations for the Six Nations in Rugby.
Major phases in the season then. Yes a match free weekend would be
great to give everyone a break after the hectic Christmas schedule.
However, I would suspect, the everyone would ramp up training for a
few days ( some topping up if you like) and then send everyone away
for a long weekend. But now the transfer window is in January,
deals need to be done. And that means getting the new boys to
quickly gel with the old ones and build some team spirit. The
business men won’t want it and neither would the managers who are
busy either reinforcing a successful or a struggling team. In fact
many teams, in the top levels of sport use January for warm weather
training camps in Spain, Portugal and Dubai. They create their own
mini-breaks and they can afford it but that isn’t a possibility for
the other clubs, who because of their less than premier facilities,
may already be adding games into an already crowded fixture
schedule. it is worth remembering that a lower end Premier League
Team may play up to 10less matches in the season than some of the
more successful Championship or League 1/2 teams. A winter break is
fine in theory – in practice it’s too difficult to manage. We could
all have a break, the weather would be fine and when we return from
it, a nicely timed cold front could mean we are back to square one
with regards to fixture congestion. Which is exactly where we are
now! Best we live things as they are.
Weather, or not, here we don’t go!
Well, yet another weather affected cancellation of sport that is affecting both players and fans, not to mention the management team. The weather not only causes problems logistically in terms of games having to be rescheduled, but also in the day-to-day planning of training and in making sure the players are in top condition when it comes to matchday!
As frustrating as it is the fans not to see their teams play, it is perhaps more frustrating for the players and the management who spend so much time preparing a team for these matches, the tapering of training (periodisation if you like) means that we’re constantly trying to ensure the players are physical prepared for each match. Not easy when you consider the disparity of facilities available to teams at different levels of the game. Even all-weather pitches are struggling to be available in this bad weather period. It sometimes requires thinking outside the box to keep training fresh and interesting, perhaps thinking of alternative training methods to prevent staleness! Again, not exactly easy at a time of year when other facilities are booked out!!
And with the severity of the weather we’ve experienced even getting to a training ground can cause major problems for players and staff; even getting out of the house can be a major obstacle for most people.
In effect this weather induced break could be a major momentum changer for teams participating in various leagues! Teams that had momentum may lose it, and a team that had none could suddenly gain it! Hardly a great state of affairs if you’ve invested much time creating momentum, team spirit and a great level of physical preparedness! It will require a great art of management to ensure that momentum is maintained, or changed if that’s appropriate, through what has been really difficult period of planning.
Even the possibility of warm weather training camps has been lost, not only because of the schedule of games during December, but because the airports are closed too! However, one benefit of the enforced break is that it does give a fantastic opportunity for injured players to complete their rehab and get back in contention.
So what does all this mean for the rest of the season; a multitude of games to be played in an extraordinarily short period of time placing great demands on the resources of clubs and the roster of players. This plays into the hands of those teams with greater resources able to hold the largest squad, with rotation of their players a possibility in order to maintain freshness.
Extending the length of the season is not a viable option with the end of the season traditionally tied to the play-offs at Wembley; this increases the pressure to shoe-horn games in. So all we can do is prepare the players as best we can and strap ourselves in for a hectic schedules of matches and travelling!
Getting into WP!
Well, its just about 2 years since I registered on WordPress and as I am determined to create a sports Science / Performance related web resource, its about time to start getting to gips with the programming and coding for WordPress.
Up until now I have used a variety of web creation tools, including iWeb, Dreamweaver, Rapidweaver and others to a greater or lesser degree and to various margins of success. None was truly intuitive – some of the online tools seemed the easiest ( http://www.squarespace.com ) so I might give that a go again soon. But I believe to have complete control I might have to try installing WP and see how that goes.
Report back soon!
The Dave Carolan Blog 
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