OK – so the initial goal has been a success. We had around 100 participants, taking part across 10 days in 2 teams. And the Website worked, everyone was able to log their steps, we had some additional devleopments along the way to improve the user experience.
Loading the teams up manually was hard work, but I created a registration page so the Team Captains were able to add additional users dynamically – this was a real help. Also the Captains can check and re-issue the competitor numbers and access codes.
The Virtual Postcards are fun, but I needed to make the facility available for someone without coding experince to add them, and set start-end dates for eahc Post-card. So we now have a Post Card Creator and the Team Capatians as well as Race Control can add them.
Some people missed to read all the Post Cards, so i added a postcard archive.
The Leaderboard was very popular, but with upto 100 competitors and only 20 places on the leader board (top 10 from each team) some people were keen to know how they were doing overall, and so I developed the “How am I doing?” section on the campaign page – where indiviudal competitors can see all of their step entries and how they ranked on each day against their onw team and the whole field (Also handy for those that may have missed to enter a day here or there).
And finally – I had some weird dates cropping up, somehow 2 competitors were bypassing the form varification and inputting badly structured dates – I found the issue, some users are still using IE as a browser and so the date verification does not work, nor does the date picker ! – so i’ve had to code a checker and error message for those users, and of course manually correct their data on the back end so that tomorrow they will receive their personalised report along with all other users.
I’ve had a lot of fun, I only got onto the leader board once, other days I have spent far too much time data crunching and web coding to improve the site.