I'm involved with my local rec baseball league. One of my duties in the coming months will be webmaster. The old site was made by someone and it's old and unkept. The only change that has been made is that they put a link to the online registration site, which is off-site.

In its first incarnation, I just plan on doing something simple. It'll have news, scores, rosters (maybe), standings, and some other stuff about the league. I'll update the standings as needed, put the scores up, and that'll be about it.

My grand plan is to make this site extremely personalized and interactive (and possibly the best rec baseball league site in existence!). I plan on having each user log in, and they will be assigned a role, as either a player (i.e. kid), parent, coach, commissioner, or board member (or a combination, we have a couple people who are a board member, commissioner, and coach). There would be personalized team sites, which list the rosters, schedules, scores, and notes from the coach. There would be general news pages, which would show news items from the league, and the news items you've already read would be marked as already read. Chat rooms, message boards, and private messages are also in the plans. I'll definitely leave some areas available for those who do not sign on, so they can still get league-wide news, as well as any team information that's not marked private by the coach.

I'm hoping y'all could throw some advice my way. If anyone has any experience working on web sites for kids, I'd especially appreciate any advice you could give me. I know about COPPA, and I plan on getting parental permission for anyone who plans on using the personalized portion of the site, or for anyone who wants to send me personal information. I'm not sure I want to moderate message boards or chat rooms, so giving the kids the ability to use message boards or chat rooms may have to be left out.

what do you have experience with? php? perl? databases?

another consideration is where will the site be hosted and what are you allowed to access there...i.e. some hosts do not allow server scripting, db's, etc.

I've got experience with Perl, although I'm not too proficient in it, and I know nothing about OO programming in Perl.

I've got a good amount of experience with ASP and JSP, and depending on the hosting site, I'll use one of those. I've also got a lot of experience with Access, Postgresql, and some with Oracle and SQL Server. If the hosting site that was recommended to me by someone in the league doesn't fit my requirements, they said I can go ahead and find somewhere else that does, and they'll pick up the tab.

I understand most of the programming side of what I plan on doing. The rest I can learn on the way. What I'm really asking about is what sorts of things do you think would be neat for a site mainly for the kids, but also for the parents and the coaches? Also, what sorts of things are overkill? I think we have about 300 kids registered in the league, so that means about 500 parents (assuming there are some households with divorced parents or where one parent really doesn't give a damn), and about 25 coaches. I wonder what fraction of those will actually use the site. Are message boards and chat rooms too much trouble? Especially considering the hassle I'd have to go through to get their information due to COPPA.

</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Originally posted by wcterp:
Are message boards and chat rooms too much trouble? </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">We've learned that the answer to that question is YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! But, its a lot of fun dealing with various attacks and malfunctions. I say go for it. I bet they'd love it.

make "baseball cards" for the kids!

</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Originally posted by drunkterp:
make "baseball cards" for the kids!</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">That's a good idea! But it ain't gonna happen. They don't keep stats for individual players, and not everyone gets their picture taken.