Features Completed in April

Just a quick update to let everyone know where I am with some of the features that were discussed last month as well as new features.

1. Offline Storage
1. Get back to server
2. Home Page
1. Start Marketing - 90%
3. Game Screen
1. Lines?
2. Timer
3. Hook up new Team buttons
4. Determine how to handle man up/down situations.  With a modifier to main action???
4. Game Info
1. Set players to unavailable
2. Set players to be "borrowed"
5. Team Screen - 
1. Bugs - COMPLETED
6. Stats
1. Game Stats 
1. need more of the team data (clears, turnover, etc).
2. Time line report
3. Time played report
4. Game Leaders - COMPLETED
2. Team Stats 
1. Create based on game, but do rollup for entire season - COMPLETED
2. Allow break down by game?
3. Team Leaders - COMPLETED
4. Additional stats
1. shots per game - COMPLETED
2. saves per game - COMPLETED
3. avg FOW percentage - COMPLETED
3. Player stats
1. Combine with player page - put more player data on, similar treatment as what I did for Teams
4. Organization
1. Repeat reports for the Org - COMPLETED
2. Org Leaders / per age/gender group - COMPLETED
7. Organization/Program Screen
1. Match US Lax types
2. Custom CSS for Orgs - start looking into CMS tools for organizations
3. Better layout - ala ESPN or CBSSports - COMPLETED
8. Following
1. Add team follow - COMPLETED
2. Post to facebook when following has action?
9. Offline Stats
1. Add offline entry of stats - important for those who can't get a live tablet and for players/teams to have a running record in a single location
10. Girls variations - get with a girl's coach to be sure I understand the primary differences.
11. Template
1. Header doesn't work for iPad - COMPLETED
2. Switch to Bootstrap - eventually - COMPLETED

Additional features implemented:

1. News
1. Added Lacrosse News for all levels
2. Twitter Feed
1. Created LaxStatsLive twitter account
2. Created lists for all levels
3. tied to news page for live twitter feed
3. Created Pinterest Account
4. Created Flickr Account
5. Created basic default Logo
6. Created CafePress account

At this point I have just a few small details to iron out before the official 1.0 Launch.  I'm thinking that I will have this completed by the middle of the month.  I really want to add some videos of how to use the software, but that may be beyond my time limitations.

May Flowers

As they say, April showers bring... well you know!  All of the hard work in March and April has the application almost ready for the v1.0 release.  I've said it before, there are still a million details to add, but it should be close enough to get out there for the world to see.  I know that between now and the Fall Season that I'll be able to get most of the extra details completed.

My approach to this all along has been an extremely agile methodology (something I advocate and teach in my day job).  Building software in that methodology helps to eliminate over thinking it up front and allows it to organically grow.  If you were to build your house this way you would start with just the framing and then address each room individually.  The rooms may start out with only curtains for walls and as you become more comfortable with the house, you might add sheetrock or other wall material.  You would have the opportunity to change your mind as much as you like and eventually have a room that fit you exactly.  You would be able to change the elevation of the house many times until you settled on the style and colors.  Unfortunately, you might not be able to live in the house for a while, but it would be exactly what you wanted when you got to the end, or if it wasn't you could keep making changes to your hearts content.

This application has been similar to that.  I've made sweeping design changes and completely removed or added functionality based on where I thought the site was going.  Now I'm at the point where I'm nitpicking details about colors and placement (not the fun stuff) getting it ready to launch.  Finishing is always the most time consuming part and I have to catch myself from not adding another feature until I finish the ones that are already there.

Regardless, the software has performed wonderfully.  I completed the Organization comparison and used it to identify the players who were leading in all of the categories across multiple teams.  It was very cool!

I missed an opportunity this week however.  This coming Saturday and Sunday is the end of year Mayla tournament where dozens of local teams will be present.  Had I been more marketing savvy, I would have been ready to show off the software during the tournament.  At this late date the all I'll be able to have ready would be business cards and flyers, neither which excite me.  So if anyone has any ideas about how to show off the software during the tournament, please drop me a note!

This week, I'll be working on the small details, trying to polish up the areas that still have a need.  I have a few features that I would like to add, but I won't until the polishing is complete.

Launch Prep

I'm still anticipating an official roll-out during the first of May.  My goal is to build traffic over the summer so that I can start to bring in new customers for the Fall.  Although I talked it up to anyone who would listen and there were a lot of people who were excited about it, no one contacted me about getting in on the beta.  Ultimately that worked out better as I didn't have the extra pressure to fix someone else's problems.

For the past week, I've been working on the marketing pages, creating explanations of the software.  I'm still going to have to create a sample Organization and let folks in to play around in, but I can easily use one that I've already created for my own use.  I'll just have to make sure that it is PC before I open it up.

I'll be creating a comparison for all known competitors and put that into a matrix.  I was very concerned with pricing.  Ultimately, I would like to make money on this.  Frankly I would rather take this from hobby status to career status.  I have the skills to make it happen, I've been in the Software Engineering industry for over 15 years now.  And I would rather do this than working for someone else.  Right now, my costs are minimal, but when it grows, so will the cost and I have to be sure everything is covered.  I finally settled on $1 per player per season.  One, $1 is not a lot of money for anyone involved.  It makes it very easy for an Organization to add LaxStats without breaking the bank.  They could (and likely will) pass the amount on to the player.  I agonized about charging parents/fans for access and eventually came to the conclusion to charge for that access as well.  The primary reason is that parents and fans who want to follow their childs career won't hesitate paying a few dollars, especially after they've already shelled out hundreds to get them into it.  Plus is a personalized view into a players career, protected from the general population.  You just can't find that anywhere else.

As a whole, its taking more time to come up with the marketing than it did with the other parts of the site.  Mainly that's because I'm a programmer, not a marketeer.

For those of you that have been following this closely, thanks for your support and encouragement.  I've been having a ball.  For those of you who have just joined are are reading this as a historical perspective, I hope it gives you some insight into how this all started and evolved.

Build .904152013

Even though last week was spring break for the kids, I spent a lot of time working on the site trying to get it ready for an official launch.  It's getting closer by the day and although I can still see a million things that I would like to add, it just has to go live and I can deal with everything else later.

First, the original template I used, while responsive, just didn't give me as much control as I would like for the site.  It was very hard to create a template with it, and I found that I just kept overriding the CSS to make it work and realized that would be a nightmare to maintain long term.  That's when I discovered bootstrap.  I had planned on moving to it someday and was only going to use it for new pages, but once I put it into use I was hooked.  I would say that it was a distraction going back to each page to clean up the site so that it worked with bootstrap, but actually it was a cleanup that needed to happen.

Not every page is bootstrap ready, I ran out of time for them all and felt that the longer I waited for a deployment, the greater my risk that something would go wrong.  Sure enough I broke the site last night while watching Game of Thrones and I'm still working on getting it right.  For those that want to know, PHP is tricky when using includes, especially includes inside includes.  Ultimately, its a path issue and I have the fix, I just have to get it in place.  The second issue was with a new feature.  I am creating a Lacrosse Only News Reader since one doesn't exist.  I'm using SimplePie as the aggregator, but its documentation needs work.  I used it exactly as the documentation suggested and it worked great locally, but when I deployed it started throwing "deprecated" errors.  Deep in the support I found the solution.  I love you SimplePie, just clean up your documentation a bit.

The following are the changes to the site for this build:

1. Bootstrap.js
1. global navigation - better user authentication/bread crumbs
2. iPad - navigation works with it
2. Marketing
1. started pages to explain what the site does and why you can't live without it
3. Stats
1. Limit game results to only those with stats (fixed bug in table sort)
2. Added additional reports
3. Player career works better (still has more work)
4. Team
1. completely redesigned
2. Org graphic
3. sub navigation for team info/coaches
4. sub navigation for games
5. Org
1. redesign started (not complete)
2. Org graphic
6. Home Page
1. RSS of this blog
2. Twitter feed for NCAA teams (will complete others, see below)
3. RSS of Lacrosse news
7. Social Integration
1. Created accounts and tie ins for Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, etc.
2. Share bar added in footer
8. Corporate
1. email/calendar
2. Phone number (Google Apps for biz now costs money so they are no longer an option [BOO HISS], props to Zoho!!!)

I've started the Social integration with the site and expect it to get more and more social as the features solidify.  I expect a lot more this week, notably some actual progress on my feature list which has not changed since I last wrote about it.  I also expect to have a news reader ready to go that will be publicly accessible (won't need a login for that) and a completion of the bootstrap conversion.

Feature Focus: April 1-15

Sorry for the limited communication over the past week.  I got a bit distracted with Taxes.  I also got distracted looking at all of the Lacrosse software that exists out there and mapping out the deficiencies in each.  At some point I'll talk about them all here, but now isn't the time.  It was distracting mainly in that I saw myself creating an all in one software package that had everything that would be needed to completely manage a team or organization.

However, that isn't my first and foremost focus.  The thing that drove me to do this in the first place was that there was no good way to record statistics (at least not real time) and get them where Followers could see (mostly proud parents to begin with).  Honestly I became concerned that I wouldn't have enough time to complete even that goal as my job situation stabilizes over the next few weeks.  I feel that what I have is unique, and is commercially viable.  I just have to have it ready by the Fall season in order to start making something with it.

Ideally, I would love to just focus on this and over the next few years build that all in one system.  I will just need to get enough sales to make that dream a reality.  That means that I need a stable version working in the next month so that I can focus on the marketing side of it so that I can make some sales for fall.  Otherwise, this is at best a hobby.  So, for the next week, the family and I will be on Spring break, which means that I'll be working from the beach to knock out a lot of these issues.

Thus far the beta tests have been working great.  I'm grateful that I was able to pick up 2 teams from the same Organization and within the same age group.  That way I can complete the comparison tools that will allow coaches to see who the leaders are for the whole age group.  There is a third team in the age group with a really good hand keeper and I want to get his stats so that I can test offline entry as well.

1. Offline Storage
1. Get back to server
2. Home Page
1. Start Marketing
3. Game Screen
1. Lines?
2. Timer
3. Hook up new Team buttons
4. Determine how to handle man up/down situations.  With a modifier to main action???
4. Game Info
1. Set players to unavailable
2. Set players to be "borrowed"
5. Team Screen - 
1. Bugs
6. Stats
1. Game Stats 
1. need more of the team data (clears, turnover, etc).
2. Time line report
3. Time played report
4. Game Leaders
2. Team Stats 
1. Create based on game, but do rollup for entire season
2. Allow break down by game?
3. Team Leaders
4. Additional stats
1. shots per game
2. saves per game
3. avg FOW percentage
3. Player stats
1. Combine with player page - put more player data on, similar treatment as what I did for Teams
4. Organization
1. Repeat reports for the Org
2. Org Leaders / per age/gender group
7. Organization/Program Screen
1. Match US Lax types
2. Custom CSS for Orgs - start looking into CMS tools for organizations
3. Better layout - ala ESPN or CBSSports
8. Following
1. Add team follow
2. Post to facebook when following has action?
9. Offline Stats
1. Add offline entry of stats - important for those who can't get a live tablet and for players/teams to have a running record in a single location
10. Girls variations - get with a girl's coach to be sure I understand the primary differences.
11. Template
1. Header doesn't work for iPad
2. Switch to Bootstrap - eventually