The Capalaba Greyhound Racing Club's Website is 5 years old on the 18th March 2008
with a Special Race named after the website on the 15th March..
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THE PAST
The humble beginnings of the Capalaba Greyhound Racing Club's website was undertaken by a novice student in web design, on the Club's internet service providers free web space, all of 5mb. Being annoyingly persisant, Burnie finally agreed to give it a go.
The website was first published on the 18th March 2003, with little content and lots of enthusium.
With this venture, the Capalaba Club, became only the second greyhound racing club in Queensland to have it's own website.
Our main aim was to get the fields, form, alpha lists etc up on the site as quickly as possible for the greyhound trainers. In the old days, this was a matter of sitting at the computer, checking the emails every few minutes and then quickly keying all of that information onto the site.
Because Capalaba was a Saturday meeting, it was important that the results appeared on the site as quickly as possible. That meant that every Saturday night was sacrificed for this to happen.
Capalaba was the first club in Queensland to use the finish lynx photos to accompany the results on their website. A little club, with a lot of ambition.
The site became so popular that after 6 months, a decision was made to buy our own Domain Name (www.capalabagreyhounds.com) and have the site hosted, and we have never looked back.
The Notice Board feature was included on the site to enable free advertising for the Greyhound community. This worked very well. Several people have either bought or sold using this page.
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THE PRESENT
Today, the workload has been reduced, with the GRAQ letting us tap into the GRAQ site resources for the Field, forms etc. thus eliminating a lot of hard yards and repetitive work.
The results are still done manually, with a target time on the Saturday for uploading. An experiment at the moment is being carried out with live results. The Capalaba site's home page now directs users to another site where the results are keyed in manually, as soon as possible after each race at Capalaba.
Depending on the popularity of this feature lies the decision to include this concept on the Capalaba site. An exercise is being carried out at the moment, calculating the usage and the hits on this page. The idea is good, but the time and effort that is taken to produce these results, whilst a committment to being at the track every Saturday to enable this feature, may or may not be worth it. We intend to gather data over the next 8 weeks to determine its worth.
The Capalaba site is extremely popular with stats providing the following information:
 Our search engine results are impressive as well. We appear in the top 20 under most greyhound related words and phrases and we are up there with the big TAB tracks and Greyhound Authorities.
So what's next ?
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THE FUTURE
A few ideas have come to hand. One of them is the possibility of making video clips available to view on the site of the days' races. This is possible, but it will take some thought and feedback to see exactly what, where and how we should be displaying them.
Most constructive ideas come from the Greyhound Trainer and Owners, because they know what they want to see and read. So if you have any ideas, crazy or as simple as they may be, please do not hesitate to contact the club.
Happy 5th Birthday !!!
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