SquashNet News

Please see the latest Funding Update from England Squash & Racketball.

This edition contains a wide range of information on new funding sources, current funding sources that have re-opened and some exciting news regarding a £370,000 investment into squash facilities around the country via the Sport England Inspired Facilities fund.

If that sounds exciting, the good news is that the next round of the Inspired Facilities fund has just opened... Read on for more information!

We'd like to wish all our clubs and their members a very Happy New Year.

The New Year has started with some great steps forward at SquashNet - our new version of the Website (v4.7.1) has now been rolled out, and all sites have been migrated to our new server.

The new version offers some great new features, as well as some neat enhancements to what was there before, and some measures to enhance still further the site's performance.  Here's just a selection of the changes:

• Improved News / Blog functionality, now easier than ever to post your club news
• Total re-design of the Forum to make it more user-friendly and easier to follow conversations by subscribing to your chosen topics
• New "Committee Page" functionality with optional custom contact forms and biographies
• New "Events List" which automatically removes events once they are in the past
• Better integration with Facebook and Twitter
• Optional scrolling "Latest News" at the top of most pages - ensure that members are aware of the latest goings-on
• Greater flexibility for administrators with page layouts and column widths

In addition to this, our Bookings clients will notice a couple of new reports:

• a new overnight report shows all the booking cancellations from the previous day
• on-screen (within Admin Functions) report which shows how long before the court time members are cancelling courts - this should be an especially useful tool for clubs who wish to prevent members booking courts protectively, cancelling them late, and therefore leaving courts empty at peak times

Following the visual improvements to the leagues system over the summer, our comprehensive overhaul of the administration functions and the member navigation is now complete.

Users will notice the following changes:

• NEW Step by step monthly process with guidance and safeguards at every stage
• NEW Dashboard for administrators so you can go direct to your chosen section
• NEW League History page which will store all future leagues and enable them to be viewed
• NEW Drag & Drop player re-ordering
• NEW Filters on League Reordering page so you can view All players, or only those who are either opted in or opted out
• NEW Restore Points for Leagues, so you can revert to a previous state if you need to
• IMPROVED Navigation for members and administrators, with simpler buttons and logical structure

We hope our existing clubs will like these improvements and, as always, we welcome your feedback and further suggestions so we can keep improving the system in the future.

If you're interested in a demo of the Leagues system, please contact us and we'll be happy to set one up for you.

The SquashNet leagues system has had a makeover!

The design of the pages for showing leagues, tournaments, ladders, ranking points etc have all been updated and given a fresh new look.  Users should still find the pages familiar - there have been no changes to the functionality.

We hope you like the new improved pages.

We are also planning some enhancements to the administration interface to help league managers.  More news on these soon...

Several enhancements for Administrators have been rolled out today in the SquashNet / ClubNet Bookings system (v1.07.009):

• The Members List now includes a Status column, showing whether members are active, expired (grey) or suspended (red) - you can sort the list of members by clicking on the column heading
• If you click on any booking in the Admin bookings grid (including block bookings), you can now see who made the booking and when (NB dates have been recorded for bookings made since March 2011 so may appear as "unknown" if set up before then;  also any bookings made by adminstrators before today will show as "administrator", but future bookings will specify the specific admin user for clubs with more than one administrator or reception login)
• Block bookings can now be made directly from the Admin bookings grid, just as easily as a member booking - press the SHIFT key when you click the court you want to book, select the coach name (if applicable) and save.  Ideal for booking one-off courts for coaches quickly so you can track their court usage via the Coach Usage report, but without having to set up all the details as for more complex (e.g. recurring / multi-court) block bookings
• There is now a restriction to prevent members or reception users from selecting an expired or suspended member as an opponent on a court booking; also reception users can no longer book courts for expired or suspended members

You can check that you're using the latest version by logging in to the admin interface and clicking the About button.  If you are still on a previous version, you may need to clear your browser cache and re-load the page.

Clubs with SquashNet or ClubNet websites can now analyse the performance of their sites to answer questions like:

• How do people find our site?  e.g. Search engines, referrals from other sites, direct traffic
• How many visitors come to our site?
• Which pages are visited most frequently?
• How long do visitors spend on the site?
• Which pages have a high "bounce rate"?  i.e. one-page visits
• Which pages do visitors most frequently exit the site from?
• and many more...

Together, these are powerful tools - for example:

1. If you have important information on a page which is rarely visited, you'll know to give that page greater prominence.
2. If pages have a high bounce rate, why?  It's probably a sign that the page doesn't contain what the visitor was expecting, so is a good indicator that you could benefit by editing the page.

Just think, with a few simple changes to your site's content, based on the cold hard facts of your site's current traffic (provided using Google Analytics), you could deliver a better experience for your members, communicate your key messages more effectively, and ensure prospective members can find the info they want about your club quickly and easily.  A small additional annual fee applies, but in the context of recruiting or retaining just one more member, it's surely a false economy not to take advantage!

Contact us on 01962 862626 to discuss having this implemented for your site today.

The new Directory of Squash & Racketball Clubs in the UK has now been launched - take a look »

All clubs are entitled to apply for a FREE Listing which displays your Club name, address and phone number.

Clubs which want to stand out from the crowd and use the Directory to raise the club's profile and maximise recruitment potential should consider a Premium Listing.  For an annual fee of just £10 per court, up to a maximum of £50 per club, a Premium Listing represents excellent value, and offers extra features such as:

• priority at the top of the listings
• your club logo
• website link
• Twitter and Facebook links
• a location map
• a contact form so that prospective members can contact you directly

Special Offer

Upgrade now and we'll automatically extend your first "year" through to 30 September 2012 for no extra charge.  That's up to 35% extra FREE!

Free Premium Listings for SquashNet clients

SquashNet clients who use our website, bookings, leagues or database systems are entitled to a complimentary Premium Listing.

So why not enhance your club's online presence with a SquashNet package and a free Premium Listing?  Contact us to find out more about how we can help.

Your club's listing

Check your club is listed correctly by searching here »

If you need to make any changes, or to upgrade to a Premium Listing, call us on 01962 862626.

Last weekend, an update was made to the Database, adding some extra functionality around reporting.

What's new?

It is now possible to limit the number of fields to choose from when building a report. This means that you can spend less time scrolling through fields that you won't ever need for searching and reporting.

If you'd like to discuss how this can enhance your database, give us a call on 01962 862626.

Following on from December's release which enhanced the powerful reporting options within the Database, this weekend a new release will see some further great features:

• Greater flexibility and precision in the criteria you can use for filtering reports using the new ANY and ALL options
• More control over which users can / cannot edit reports in your database

There will be approximately 30 minutes of downtime from approximately 1.30pm this Sunday while this upgrade is released.

We have now completed the transfer of our bookings and leagues modules to our new server, providing clubs with enhanced reliability and performance.