The Red Knight wrote:Is there any point to having this PTV site other than the fact the club makes a little bit of money from it through advertising which surely could be generated by ourselves?
Inability to properly advertise pre season fixtures, the squad page still showing the players who were released and amazingly Ryan McCann is still on there! Darren Moss isn't even listed on it either. There is also a mix match of pictures on the profiles from last season and the season before that meaning some of the pictures are 2 years out of date.
Rene Howe is still on the main banner as well.
It seems to me that we are sacrificing quality for money.
As someone who worked on the PTV site implementation and still does I can understand what you're saying but I have to make the point that you're doing so with little or no knowledge of the structure or economics of the site itself.
Let's go through a few points:
1. The PTV site is completely free of charge. The costs for the club to build and maintain a site with similar functionality would be a lot of money that its questionable will be re-couped.
2. You state that the site 'generates a little bit of money through advertising'. Yet advertising is a very small part of the revenue generating potential of the PTV site. Here's the 3rd quarter (or just three months) revenues of a un-nanmed Championship club from PTV.
World - £18,108
Syndication - (distribution of news articles to the media) - £9,848
Mobile content - £1,462
Betting - £604
Poker & Casino - £521
Advertising - £10,815
Other - £4,800
So that's £46K revenue from their FLI site for just one quarter.
3. By being part of FLI the club becomes part of a co-operative and thus a part-owner. Given the potential the club could reap the rewards of this for years to come.
And there's a lot more you aren't aware of. So its down to the club and its volunteers to make a real go of the site and I think we're doing everything we can to make it work. Yet we're not a Championship club with huge resources but instead the club that makes the most of limited resources.
Finally you make a comment about the banner featuring Rene Howe (I know you're not like this but your complaining is like Simply Ned) again without knowing the facts. Over the past two weeks all the Morecambe websites have been updated with new banners, new kit shots and new logos. If you look again at the FLI site you'll notice Bench and Croft Goode logos as well as an updated shop image. A new header banner was created and sent to FLI on July 1. However I've just been informed that part of the banner overlaps with a development change they've made and it wasn't uploaded. I'm now working on a new one to send to them. Given that we can only update new banners after official season end on July 1 we're running only 13 days late because PTV didn't inform us of the need to change it.
As regards player changes, Quinny (who has a full-time job) has to inform PTV and the Press Association of any changes. Given we've got limited time to do this it makes sense to wait until our full squad is completed or near enough, and then provide those in one go.
Of course this could have been updated earlier but resources don't allow, which is why I know the football club would be keen to hear from anyone wanting to write, edit and add content for the website on a voluntary basis. If you are interested then PM me.