Papers for 2010 Annual Meeting

Page published 13 July 2011

MCCU Public Relations Director’s Report 2009-10

Ray Collett

Resulting from a decision at last year’s AGM, the Publicity Director took on the role of Webmaster. Access to the MCCU site was gained in August 2009. This activity has taken all of the time available to the Publicity Director and there has been no further issue of The Middlegame. Also, the director has not had time to consult and set up events or photo opportunities for winners of MCCU events.

Does the meeting wish as a policy to publicise to a wider audience winners of MCCU events?

Publication policy

During this year the webmaster has given priority to on-line publication of

• MCCU events especially the MCCU stages of the inter-county competitions
• Notices of congresses including junior events within MCCU members’ areas
• Reports, or links to organisers’ sites, and results of congresses held within MCCU members’ areas
• Rules about MCCU events
• Information and copies of papers about administrative matters within MCCU
• Summaries of administrative matters from the ECF.

This policy has resulted in the publication of just under 100 new web pages, which include the results of about 70 county matches, 40 news items, and the results of the MCCU Grand Prix and Correspondence competitions.

The Webmaster would like to hear comments on the appropriateness of this policy.

Effectiveness of website

The webmaster has no means of checking the effectiveness of the website. Web hosting organisations are able, usually at extra cost, to provide website statistics, which would inform us about the number of unique visitors to the site, the pages visited and the route taken to enter the site (whether from a search engine enquiry or from another chess site for example).

The webmaster recommends that the MCCU obtains access to site statistics

Site maintenance

The site was originally established in 2006 and to date has had 3 webmasters. Technology and webpage coding has moved rapidly since the site was first created and each webmaster has quite rightly sought to establish a distinctive style. This has resulted in the site becoming difficult to manage with probably over 2000 duplicated files within the site. Consequently rationalising the site is becoming more pressing. Apart from some minor tidying, however, this task has not been attempted because it is a large one. If the meeting wishes to re-appoint the present webmaster, it is his intention to delete some features of the site. These are (1) table of contents and (2) the page misleadingly titled news, but containing links to changed pages. Both pages are difficult to maintain because of the large number of links they contain.

News Stories

Presently, it takes about 30 minutes to load, check and correct a county match result and this time could be shortened if the webmaster and the Controller of the MCCU county competitions can agree on a new electronic results form for reporting results. The webmaster relies on receiving results from county teams, organisers and congress organisers and some events are more promptly reported than others.

The webmaster would like to hear discussion on how the quality of the reporting service can be enhanced.