New Launch; Free Online Tools for You to Use

Tampa's new site is up at www.tampaspartans.com. We've implemented some new technologies on the site and feel it is a great improvement from the old site. One feature that did not exist in any form on the old site is the presence of the online store. The store is powered by Prep Sportswear, and you can access the store directly at www.BuySpartan.com.

We would like to invite you to follow us on Twitter (www.twitter.com/athleticsite) and fan us on Facebook (www.bit.ly/9DEa2l). Notice how that last link does not appear to go to Facebook? That's the first of the online tools I want to show you, if you have not seen them before.

www.bit.ly, along with other sites like www.tinyurl.com, are URL shorteners. Long story short (no pun intended), they will take a link that could consist of 100 or more characters and shorten them all the way down to just a handful of characters. TinyURL has an advantage in that you can make a custom URL, as long as you are the first one to register/submit it. For example, if you are making a link to your live stats which is quite long, you can paste your link in the tinyURL form and then specify a custom link like www.tinyurl.com/ABClivestats ... almost as good as grabbing a domain name for your live stats! The advantage of Bit.ly is that your link is as short as 17 characters long like mine above.

Along with the link shorteners, another tool you may find useful from time to time is an online image editor I discovered called SumoPaint (www.sumopaint.com/home/). If you're used to Photoshop, this interface is going to be very familiar. It puts at your fingertips the most common tools you'd need to quickly edit an image for your website: crop, scale, sharpen, color adjust, and even a pretty amazing number of filters for a free product. While I doubt it will supplant your need for good photo editing software like Photoshop and its competitors, it might mean you can purchase one less copy for your office if the other computers only use an image editor for the basic tools available in SumoPaint.

I hope you've enjoyed this post, and I plan to include more tips to help you with your online work next time!

Anderson University joins the fold

Just added officially as a new client, Anderson University (S.C.) will be coming on board this fall. There are a couple more that we're waiting on paperwork for.

We also want to announce recent affiliations we've made with Penn Atlantic, an audio/video streaming partner, and Prep Sportswear, an online storefront for branded apparel. Both of these are free to use, and there are moneymaking opportunities for athletic departments through both ventures.

We'll soon be unveiling a new University of Tampa website, as well as the prototype for our mobile version of our websites.