A few SIDEARM FAQs and Tips

Hello all, first blog post from the corporate office and I must say it's actually better than I expected. Working closely with the designers, research and development team, programmers and project managers has been great.

Over the last few weeks, our project managers and the rest of the customer support team have seen a common group of requests of both new and veteran clients not fully understanding that even some of the simpler tasks in SIDEARM are under their control. Therefore we will try to address some of these, as well as provide some additional tips and tricks you can try within your site.

FAQs
You are adding a new schedule or roster and you don't see a 2009-10 or 2010 season listed

1. You can add seasons into the software on your own if you go to Site Settings and Seasons

2. Hit the plus sign next to seasons and you will see Add Season and click this link

3. You will enter a season for example 2009-10 for the Long Title and Shortname and for the start date of multi-year seasons would be 7/1/2009 in this example and a season such as 2010 would have a start date of 1/1/2010.

Your marketing director comes into your office and says I would add Promotions under Athletic Department links or a coach says I want to add a link for camps to their baseball index.

[For Main Navigation (traditionally located on sites as left or horizontal navigation)]
1. To place a link under your main navigation, go to the backend of your website and then go to Navigation

2. Then Main Navigation in top menu Choose a Section

3. Select a top navigation section such as "Athletics" and hit search

4. Click the "Add New" button at the bottom

5. Insert a Link Title (i.e. Marketing, Sports Medicine, Camps, Clinics, etc.)

6. Then you choose where to have it linked to (i.e. Build Link to an area within
managed components of the site, link to a sport file or link to a document)

7. Select parent as Top-Level or choose a different section if you want it to appear as a sub-navigation under that section

8. Save changes and it will appear

9. You can change rank order if you like of the items you place in here as well by clicking the drag and drop tab.

You can also add direct links from the navigation items on the left or top by clicking on Manage Navigation Sections then you will see a list of the items and edit one and you will see an area to link to an outside URL, build a link, link to a sport file or document, etc.

[For Sports Index Navigation (traditionally right navigation)]
1. To place a link into the sidebar navigation of a sport home page go to the backend of your website and then go to Navigation

2. Then Category Sidebars in top menu Choose a Sport

3. Select a sport home page such as "Baseball" and hit search

4. Click the "Add New" button at the bottom

5. Insert a Link Title (i.e. Roster, Coaches, Stats, etc.)

6. Then choose where to have it linked to (i.e. Build Link to an area within managed components of the site, link to a sport file or link to a document)

7. Save changes and it will appear

8. You can change rank order if you like of the items you place in here as well by clicking the drag and drop tab.

Creating a URL Redirect (making a more user-friendly link to promote an event)
1. To find this section you must go to Navigation and hit the plus sign to expand and see URL Redirects.

2. Next hit the plus sign on URL redirects to see Add Redirect

3. This will display several fields to fill in, the first is Text which is what you want the part after http://www.sidearmsports.com/ - for example joss, then the URL would be http://www.sidearmsports.com/joss

4. The second field URL would be if you wanted the redirect to go to an offsite URL (say something that isn't very user-friendly such as this directions example to the ICS Corporate Headquarters:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Smith+Drive,+Syracuse,+NY&sll=43.038674,-76.132751&sspn=0.001055,0.001843&ie=UTF8&ll=43.039568,-76.132936&spn=0.008437,0.014741&z=16&iwloc=A&iwstate1=actions

5. You can also build a link to an area within the site and the other selection options are if you wanted to link to a sport file or a document you have added to your SIDEARM site.

Tips

Adding your conference logo to your schedules
1. You can add logos to your conference games by expanding Site Settings and you will see Conferences

2. Click on Conference and you will see Choose a Conference in the top right frame. Select the conference you want to add a logo to in the pull down menu and click edit conference button

3. You will see a logo section and choose image link. This will open the images component and you can either add a logo as a new image or search for it, if you have already loaded this into the images component. You will just select the appropriate resize to appear on the schedule. If a resize isn't available that you like, you can always upload a specifically sized image as a new version of your conference logo.

4. Once you select the image, you must ensure that you remove the "*" that was designating conference games, as this will take precedence over an image chosen.

Adding Headshots on Roster Pages
There is now a way for the image of a player to show up on the roster page as in the example (http://www.suathletics.com/roster.aspx?path=Football).

1. To add an image column to an existing roster, you need to edit the Fields tab of a roster.

2. If you wanted it to be the second column after the jersey number you have to first move the current fields down a column to be able to insert. For instance, if name was originally in the second column then the Name would be moved to the third column and subsequent fields would need to be adjusted downward.

3. Then find the field entitled "Image" and place it into the second column.

4. After you have completed these steps, your roster should now look like the Syracuse website.

Password Protecting Pages
SIDEARM now has the ability to restrict access to specific groups for sport files.

(Setting up the Group)
1. Go to Protected Access and expand the category with the plus sign to the left of the title

2. Then expand the Groups link with the plus sign and click Add New Group. Give the group a title and description if you like and you have the option to set an expiration date for this group.

3. Once a group is setup adding users to groups, this is done at the link above Users and expand the link with the plus sign and click Add New User. This can be individuals or you can use a universal UN/PW for all athletes for example and you select the groups this UN/PW have access to.

(Restricting Access to a Sport File)
1. Add a new sport file and in doing so on the details page you will see a selection area at the bottom to restrict access to the group you setup earlier.

Adding Google Directions to your Facility Listings on Your Schedules

(Add a Sport File for Directions to Facility)
1. Add new Sport File and give it a title example, ICS Dome.

2. In the Text Area click the source button on the editor toolbar in the top left corner and paste the embed code from Google Maps.
(Getting the embed code from Google)
a. Visit http://maps.google.com and type in your facility location or an address as close as possible to the facility.
b. After the location is mapped click on the Link button in the top right corner of the google site. Copy embed code and paste as instructed in step 2.

3. Don't select a primary image

4. Associate it with which sports you want or general category

5. Click finish and save.

(Linking Sport File to Facilities Page)
1. Expand Site Settings and click on Facilities. You should see a pulldown menu on the top right window of SIDEARM and you can select a facility and edit it.

2. Click link to the sport file and browse for the file you created in the previous steps. Now when people see the facility listed on your schedules, they can click for directions.

There are certainly more FAQs and tips that our Customer Support team will offer in the coming months. Our plan is to run these at least once a week and they will be available to review when you have time. At least now there are less games to worry about and it's more of a relaxing time of the year so you can mess around with your SIDEARM site a bit more.

Let us know if you have any specific areas you would like to be addressed. Please send your questions to us at training@support.internetconsult.com