Brockton Youth Softball League For Girls: Webmaster Tips

Welcome to the Team Webmaster Tips & Policies page. The Webmaster tips page will help budding webmasters enhance your BYSL team page. It will include tips for putting pictures up on your site as well as instructions for entering other information on enhancing your team page.

If you have any suggestions for what should be included on this page, please let the webmaster know by sending him an e-mail! The purpose of this page is to provide guidance to team webmasters and other users of the BYSL website in the following areas:

General Website Policies
1. Website Safety Policies
2. Website Decorum Policies
Team Webmaster Guidelines
1. Accessing the Admin Portion of the Website
2. Team Website Features
3. Be Unbiased - Not a Homer
4. Photo Filing System
5. Building Your Team's Website
Hints/Tips for Team Webmasters
1. Helpful Hints from the BYSL Webmaster
2. Intermediate Webmaster Tips





General Website Policies

Website Safety Policies
The following points highlight the Brockton Youth Softball Leauge policies regarding the use of names and images on the BYSL website:

Names. First names of BYSL players may be included on team rosters, in game summaries and in other articles or other text on the website with a signed waiver from guardian/parent.

Photos and images. Photographs and other images of BYSL players may be included on team rosters, in game summaries and in other articles or other text on the website with a signed waiver from guardian/parent.

Names and photos. Player names and player photographs may be used together to identify a player with a signed waiver from guardian/parent.

While BYSL does not believe any significant risk is associated with the above policies, especially since membership in the website is required to view such information, the following exceptions to the BYSL website policies are available to any parent, for any reason, at any time:

Picture of a single player: Should be limited to use with only first name identification, no name identification or an outright ban on single player pictures.

Group pictures: Should be limited to first name identification or no name identification.

Name use: Should be limited to first name only, first name and last initial, coach-given nickname, or no name at all.

If any parent wishes to apply any of the above provisions to his or her child, please contact your team webmaster.

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Website Decorum Policies
When adding any information to any team webpage, the Guestbook or a Bulletin Board, the following policies must be followed by all BYSL website Members, Coaches and Helpers:

1. All comments, statements, editorials, opinions, etc. included on the website should be constructive in nature and generally positive in approach.

2. No derogatory statements of any kind about other players, coaches, parents, umpires, etc. will be tolerated.

3. Depending on the context and the tone, good natured bantering may be acceptable in limited circumstances - e.g., on a Bulletin Board. Any material violating this policy will be deleted from the website. The BYSL Webmaster, as proxy for the Board will generally make this determination.

4. Repeated violations of this policy will result in the termination of website privileges for any person violating these policies.

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Team Webmaster Tips
Accessing the Admin Portion of the Website

The eteamz system is extremely easy to use. If you can click, type, and access the Internet, that's all the training you really need to be an eteamz webmaster.

To enter news articles, upload pictures, add calendar items or make any other changes to a team website, a Coach or Helper needs to access the Admin portion of the website. From any page of the website, just click on the Admin label to go to the log-in page. Just bookmark this page to make it easier to access it in the future. Next, the Coach/Helper User Name and Password must be entered. After this is successfully completed, the user will have rights to make changes to all portions of the team website.

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Team Website Features

The following features on the team website are controlled by the Coach/Helper and are accessed by entering the Admin section of the website:

Welcome - the message that appears at the top of the Team Home page.

Team News - just enter text for any team news; images, photos, audio and video can easily be added to the news item.

Calendar - team games will automatically appear on the team Calendar, but the entries for any other occasion can easily be entered.

Schedule Games - to schedule/reschedule game dates, times, opponents and locations.

Practices - to enter team practices.

Locations - to add practice game locations (no entries should be required).

Rosters - to enter highlights, photos and other information about players and coaches.

Display - to change site colors, contact person, logo and website counter.

Uploads - to upload photos, images, sounds, videos or files for a team's website.

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Be Unbiased - Not a Homer

Please try to write highlights from the perspective of a neutral observer, rather than that of a hometown writer - aka a "homer." This will be difficult at first, but by using   your team's score book, you should have sufficient information to write a balanced version of the game highlights.

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Photo Filing System

We strongly encourage the use of photos on your team's website. To make it easier to find and maintain your own files, the BYSL webmaster asks that you follow the following convention when you upload them:

. Upload them into to a designated subdirectory (e.g., 2002 Ponytail Team Pics) -- not just into images (which pops up when you go to Upload.
. Try to start each file name with a team identifier -- e.g., MHBill for a picture of Mud Hen's head coach Billy "the Bad Boy" Anhut.

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Building Your Team's Website

So you just volunteered - or got volunteered - to build/maintain your team's website and you're probably wondering where to start. Based upon the previous experience of the webmaster, here are some ideas:

Responsibilities You Must Perform

1. Comply with the BYSL website decorum policies.

2. Have fun with this. Remember-it's for all the BYSL players.

Bells and Whistles

1. Enter a team roster (using first names, first and last names, or nicknames given by the coaches) possibly including a picture of the coaches and players .

2. Solicit, collect and then add background information for the players and coaches. Click on Handouts to download a Word file with a list of sample background information questions for parents and coaches.

3. Put pictures into text of Game Summaries and other write-ups. By following the html format shown with Intermediate Webmaster Tips, you can easily add small player photos to the text of your Game Summaries.

4. Make an online team newsletter a feature of your Team News.

5. Create individual player highlight webpages. By entering individual player highlights for each player by clicking on the pencil by a player's name on the Team Roster page, by the end of the season, each player will have his own personalized webpage, complete with highlights from the season. Photographs can easily be uploaded at the top of each player's page.

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Hints/Tips for Team Webmasters
Helpful Hints from the BYSL Webmaster

Based upon previous experience, the BYSL webmaster recommends that you adhere to the following practices with using the Admin features of the website:

1. Draft your work before posting it in Admin. Not very often, but on occasion, your browser may crash or the eteamz.com website may lock up while you're entering data. If you're at the end of composing the final touches from the highlights of an exciting game and the system locks up, well, let's just say you don't want to go there - it's not pretty. If you are drafting a news item, updating a player's roster or entering a game summary, you'll definitely want to prepare and save your text in a word processing program before you log-in to eteamz.com.

2. Keep the website open in one window while you work on Admin in another window. As soon as you complete and enter a score, a news item, etc. in Admin, all you have to do is click the Reload button on your browser to see how the most recent change looks on the website. This approach also works well if you want to build a link to somewhere else in the website as you can just cut and paste from the target address in the location window on your browser.

3. If the eteamz.com system is slower than normal, come back later. While it occurs only rarely, sometimes the eteamz.com system is slow because of heavy traffic or it sends error messages due to system maintenance. Don't get frustrated. Do the bare minimum of business at the time (e.g., get your game score entered) and come back later to do any other Admin activities.

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Intermediate Webmaster Tips

This page of the BYSL website, introducing the eteamz system, flatly stated that the system is so easy to use that if you can click, you can type, and you can access the Internet, that's all the training you need to be an eteamz webmaster. But what if you want to do a little more as a team webmaster?

A separate Word document can be downloaded at Handouts that includes tips on how to include the following features in your website:


Underline, Bold, Italics and Centering
Link to a Webpage
Internal Link
Photo or Graphic in Text
e-mail Link
Change Font Size
Justify Right
Image within a Link

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Team Pages
The BYSL website has created web pages for all teams at every level in Brockton Youth Softball League for girls. Schedules have also been entered for every team. What happens to each team page after that is up to each team's coach and/or fans. Every team can spiff up their page by adding team rosters, photos, game summaries, audio, video, or whatever else they can think of that will fit on a web site!

What do you have to do to start making your site the envy of the league? Email the webmaster with your request to become a webmaster for your team page and she'll get you started. It's easier to do than you might expect, so give it a try!




E-mail the Webmaster