West Raleigh Baseball: For Team Administrators

Sunday, November 24
New Admin's
If you're new to administering your team website or the overall league website, you can find out how to do just about anything by clicking here!
Also...attached is a handout for training Team Administrators in updating scores, and adding to their individual team Home Pages.
Handout: WR Team Administrator Training

Monday, March 24
HTML CHEAT SHEET
For new team admins...I have added an HTML Cheat Sheet showing some simple examples of HTML tagged text samples you can cut-and-paste into your team sites, and then just change the text as needed.

Check it out!
Handout: HTML Cheat Sheet for Team Admins

Tips from the Webmaster: Uploading digital photos to the West Raleigh website
Obviously the first step is to get the pictures, and download them from the camera to your PC.  After downloading, you may want to crop the picture to frame it properly...cropping too much can make the photo grainy, so you want to make sure it still looks sharp after cropping. Once downloaded and cropped (if needed), the key step is to use your photo-editing software to reduce the size of the pictures so that they will display properly on the website, and so they won't take up too much disk space on eTeamz.  Even if you crop a picture significantly, this is necessary - cropping does not reduce the file size enough, and will not affect the "display size" of your photo. 

Note: don't use Windows XP photo-editing; when you reduce the picture size using this editor, it doesn't reduce the file size...it will still load very slowly and take up lots of space!  I recommend using whatever photo editor came with the digital camera - they all seem to do a pretty good job.  I use MGI PhotoSuite, and it works very well.

I recommend sizing "large" shots like team pictures down to 640 x 480 pixels - roughly 1/3 of the original resolution from my camera.  Individual player and action shots I usually size down to 480 X 360 or 540 X 480.

If I were printing the picture on a photo printer, I would want to keep a  higher resolution, but web page displays can't take advantage of such resolution as much as a good printer can,  so keeping high-resolution on the website costs a lot, makes pictures display slowly (a killer if you have parents using dial-up internet service) and doesn't really add any value to what you can see.  Editing like this makes the picture a whole lot smaller, and I think it displays just fine...As an example - typically my camera shots take 2.1 Mb of storage per photo as shot. When I crop and re-size them, even at 640 X 480 pixels, they are typically around 50Kb per photo...We can store a WHOLE LOT of files that size on our website, and they look great.  On my high-speed cable internet service, a full-size photo takes around 2.5 to 3.5 seconds to load.  I don't even want to think about how long that takes over dialup service...while the resized photos load just about instantly - and perform well over dialup. 

When re-sizing a photo, make sure you keep the aspect ratio the same....for example, my camera's photos are 2272 X 1704 pixels.  The default picture height is 75% of the width....for an uncropped picture this ratio should stay the same, so I could reduce it to 1000 X 750 pixels or 640 X 480, or 480 X 360 and it will look the same.  If I change the aspect ratio to 80% (say, 1000 X 800) the picture will look "squished"....if I made it 50% (say 1000 X 500) the picture will look "stretched out".

Another tip - learned painfully - is that you should save your resized photos with a different name...that way if you want to go back and print out a photo, you have the original resolution version saved on your PC.

eTeamz allows you to display photos at any pixel resolution, but again this does nothing to reduce file size or display performance, just changes the size of the image displayed.  So I don't recommend using this much, unless you want display a thumbnail size picture that people can click on to see the full size image.

When you upload your photos to the WR website, please upload to a category for your team...this makes it a whole lot easier for you to find your photos while in "Admin" mode and makes it easier for the webmaster to "clean up" and administer the site after the season!


Wednesday, May 10
The "Big Picture" For Team Administrators
As some of you have recently noticed, the West Raleigh website's storage space is getting over-full. This mostly due to very big picture files on the website...these files unnecessarily take up storage, and also take a long time for your viewers to load. Please review your picture files, and either remove the large ones or use a photo editor software package to reduce the number of pixels in the file to 480 X 360 for action shots, and 720 X 640 for team photos. Please take this action within the next week...if the large photos are not removed or reduced, the Webmaster may have to remove them from the site...

Tip: Cropping pictures does very little to reduce the file size. Most photo editors also have an option to reduce the pixel count. While this reduces resolution a little bit, it still leaves the photos about as sharp as most computer displays can take advantage of, so the dropoff is mostly noticeable when printing pictures.

If you are unable to do this and want help, please Click Here to email the webmaster for assistance.