2009 Site Upgrades
We’re four weeks away from the 2009 Daytona 500, and the upgrades we’ve been working on over the off-season are ready to go. Starting today we’ll be replacing the old version of the site with the new and improved version. We’ve taken alot of the feedback received over the 2008 season, and made quite an overhaul.
The general look of the site will remain the same, with a couple small changes. The league menus have been moved from the right side bar to inside the content area, with the right side column reserved for site info, blog posts, etc. and the google ads have been removed.
The biggest change made to Nascar Pools Online, is personal user accounts. Previously, there was only one login for the entire league, and everyone saw the same thing. This was a bit of a nuisance for a number of people who were in more than one league on the site. Now all of their teams/leagues will be together in one place, with only one login to remember. Several of the commissioners from 2008 suggested league message boards, for some friendly smack talk between competitors. The personal logins enables this as well. There will still be the ability for people to view pool standings without having to register on the site, or login, but they wont be able to post messages, view stats, etc.
We’ve also added a handful of default pool types/groups for you to use in setting up your pool. Any pool using one of the default set ups also have the option to allow people to pick their teams directly on the site. All they will need to know is the league login and password, which you can include in the emails or sheets you send out to prospective participants.
We will be adding the ability to view more statistics, related to both your league and to driver performance. Pool participants will be able to see how many spots they jumped from one race to the next, how drivers performance in a race translates to your league scoring, and specific driver stats for the current season, as well as some historical stats. Currently our database includes the 2007 and 2008 seasons.
We will be rolling out the site in parts, starting with the user registration/login set up, followed by the league creation, and team picking both online and by the commissioner. That will be followed by league standings for both registered and no-registered users. After that the message boards will be added to leagues, as will the league notes. The stats pages (other than the one that already existed) are pretty useless without some races in the books, and will be added last. Of course all of this will be done prior to the Daytona 500.
We at Nascar Pools Online are looking forward to what should definitely be an interesting NASCAR season.