sailing clubs

[yorks]

Hi all

I am assembling a directory of all types of clubs and groups in the UK (not only sailing and boating!)

If anyone on here runs a club or a sailing grouple please visit

http://www.whichclub.co.uk and press the "add club" button to add your details

Thanks in advance

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[nordic_ranger]

Whats the purpose of your directory (sailing and boating) as almost all clubs in that category are RYA affiliated and are listed on their website.

Jim.

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[yorks]

Hi

We are hoping to create a directory of all types of clubs in the UK. Many people dont know where to look for such clubs on the net and may not be aware of the RYA website

regards

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[webcraft]

What's a grouple?

- Nick

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[AndrewB]

I think you've missed the boat. There are a number of general purpose club index sites already. A full list of yacht clubs is not only available on the RYA website, but also on the <A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.uksail.com/>UK Sailing Index</A>, plus a number of other sites with less full lists. Both these sites are well-known but anyway will be readily thrown up by a Google search.

 

[yorks]

Well surely most clubs would appreciate as much publicity as possible I would have thought ? I know if I were running a club I certainly would.

Our site is not only about sailing clubs but clubs covering all varieties of interests. Sailing is just one small section of it.

From experience if I type 'sailing clubs' on google probably 90% of the websites that are found are complete rubbish with out of date information, submission forms that dont work, red writing on a green background etc etc

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[yorks]

its a group typed by someone who cant type

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[AndrewB]

I certainly agree with you about rubbish directory sites. There are two particular problem types.

1. Those started with the best of intentions by an enthusiast who sooner or later runs out of steam, and they rapidly become out of date. Unmaintained 'self-completion' sites also fall in this category.

2. Those started by a commercial interest, selling slots to clubs (or whatever) effectively to advertise themselves. These are a particular bane because the authors go to great pains to make them highly conspicuous to web searches, yet at the same time being chargeable they remain hopelessly incomplete. Generally these sites also feature dozens of irritating pop-ups. Real web-spam, in my view.

Provided yours doesn't fall into either of these categories, specially the second, I wish you well. The best directory sites are those maintained by an organisation like the RYA or YBW, or by an established directory provider, which by their nature have access to up-to-date information and where the incentive to maintain web listings accurately is not driven solely by advertising revenue.

 

[webcraft]

Your site seems like a good idea.

However, to make it work you will have to spend many days and weeks hard graft going through endless searches to track down all these clubs yourself - a few posts on bulletin boards will NOT do the trick! You need to pillage every club list already on the web, weed out all the dead links and inaccurate information, check the database with hundreds of searches to make sure most of them produce a useful result . . . and THEN launch it.

As usual, the first three searches I did on your site for a specific type of club in a specific area returned 'no matches found'

IMHO it is self-defeating to put sites like this up unless the database contains a significant number of entries and the majority of searches give a result. You are now yourself guilty of the criticism you make of sites that are complete rubbish. Yours looks nice, but because there is no data it is as useful as a chocolate fireguard. I would change my robots.txt file and robots meta tags to prevent the site being indexed for now, and keep very quiet about it until most searches produce a result - then launch it and hit the bulletin boards and major organisations.

I speak as someone who maintains several directory sites . . . it's very hard work, and certainly not a route to fame and fortune . . . and as AndrewB points out, inaccurate, out of date, un-navigable or seriously incomplete directories are a total pain for all of us.

- Nick

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[claymore]

And another thing - if you have a catch all club directory that wouldn't be good because we'd get linked with things like Flower Arrangers or Morris Dancers and all they other English Jessie pastimes - nooo, Ah, reckon we'll keep the Royal Cuilfail Yacht Squadron aff yer list.

<hr width=100% size=1>regards
Claymore
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