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This topic aims to give some guidance about the type of content to create in different scenarios.

News and Events

Go to Mode: Website Menu: Content > News or Events

By their nature, news and events are items that have a certain 'currency' i.e. they change regularly. The in built News and Events feature of SportzVault ensures:

News/events entry screen streamlines the creation process
Expiry dates can be assigned - this removes items after their 'use-by' date
Display of items on the SportzVault site (home page, right bar, etc) is taken care of for you

News and Event items are limited to 7500 characters each (including html markup). This should be sufficient in most cases.

Photos/Images Galleries

Go to Mode: Website Menu: Content > Slideshow Galleries

A common need of sporting clubs is to upload photos/images relating to particular matches/events/functions etc. For example, you may wish to group and display photos taken at a particular day's play.

The built in Slideshow Galleries feature of SportzVault:

Photos can be viewed easily as a slideshow - with either manual or automatic movement between each image
Captions can optionally be provided
Image thumbnails are automatically generated. This is a good way of giving the user a 'preview' of all photos without having to display all photos on the same page (which could lead to very slow download times)
Layout is taken care of for you

Other content

Go to Mode: Website Menu: Content > HTML Pages > General Pages

This refers to content on your site that you may wish to create, some examples are

general information about your club/association
history
rule book
forms to download

The two options for creating this type of content are:

Html pages
Other file format (uploaded as a File)

When choosing between these two options, consider the following:

	Html file	Other file format
User access/readability	Excellent - content displays within the browser, the content is 'integrated' with theSportzVault site	Content will popup in a new browser window. Ability for user to read depends on the file format chosen. Special 'reader' software may be needed to read the content. For example, just about all people would have (or be able to download easily) a PDF reader to access PDF files. Most would be able to read a Word document, few would be able to read a Visio Flowchart.
Ease of creation	We've attempted to make our Html editor as easy as possible to use, and it supports copy and paste from most external programs (e.g. Microsoft Word). However, getting the correct layout for long or complicated documents will take some time and patience.	If you are familiar with a tool such as Microsoft Word/Excel etc, you may find it easier to create content in this environment.
Richness of formatting/layout	Our Html editor supports a wide range of formatting, but will not be as comprehensive as other tools. This is more a restriction on Html and web browsers rather than our editor.	Depends on the tool, but typically excellent.
Printing	Content can be printed from a web browser, but results can vary.	Usually excellent.
File size, speed of download	Html is a very compact format, download and access time is fast	Most tools create files which are quite large even for simple documents. This will slow access times for the end user.

Our general recommendations: Create content as Html pages wherever possible. A long document such as a rule book could be broken up into several Html pages, and each page could be accessed from a separate menu item on the site. Where formatting and printability is important, consider using the PDF or RTF formats. Only use proprietary formats (such as Word, Excel etc) as a last resort.

Notes on file formats:

PDF - Portable Document Format (sometimes known as 'Acrobat'). This is the most widely used file format on the web and the PDF reader is freely available for download. See the Adobe web site for details about the reader, and the software required to create PDF documents.
RTF - Rich Text Format. Most Word processors are able to open and save files in this format. Therefore if a user encounters an RTF document on the web, they should be able to open and read the file (with most formatting preserved) in their word processor, regardless of the tool used to create the document in the first place.