Swimming

This is where my interest in web building came from.

I was 'volunteered' to be Treasurer and Membership Secretary of James's swimming club at the time. I inherited an entirely paper-based system for recording payments and communicating with members. It was a nightmare.

The first thing I did was put all the financial data into a spreadsheet, which was a major improvement. Over time I developed a sophisticated suite of linked Excel spreadsheets and, most important, offered an incentive to switch to standing orders, which massively eased the burden of chasing up non-payment.

I also saw the communications issues as in need of reform. I bought a domain for the club and developed a simple HTML web site. This, and email for those that had it, transformed communications. I stopped running off hundreds of copies of the quarterly newsletter; increased the frequency to monthly; and sent it by email and put it on the web site. Over a few months I phased out the paper completely. The monthly frequency may sound like more work, but actually it reduced the heavy load once a quarter and spread it out. Also by making the reports and news more timely people actually read it.

I managed all of this with Excel and HTML at first but realised that more was possible and started learning PHP and MySQL. I never got to apply it however, because the club lost its way and as a result I resigned. But I'd be happy to work with anyone wanting to build a club site.

Here is the club site (now in need of a serious overhaul!)