Description of the Service
This service is intended to:

Notices are short adverts for the meet giving information such as: Organising Club, Venue, Events, Age groups, Date, Closing date for entries and organiser/contact name and address

Programmes and Conditions provide a list of the events to be held and the rules or conditions imposed on entrants. The cost of entering should be stated together with the precise name of the person/club to whom payment should be made.

Entry forms are forms that let the competitor state which events they wish to enter and give their "submitted times" for those events.

Sending in Notices, Programmes, Conditions and Entry Forms
There are two types of media on which these items can be provided, paper or digital. Digital items can be sent for loading, on floppy disks or as E-mail attachments.

These items are usually produced in electronic form and if the digital form is available, this is preferable, as the items could be loaded directly onto the Internet, with the minimum of manual intervention, to make them available to readers.

There may be some conversion problems in getting the information from several different word processors (e.g. WordPerfect, Word, etc.), spreadsheets (MS Excel, Lotus 123, etc.), databases (MS Access, Dbase, etc.) into Internet form (HTML), but once overcome, the information could be transferred rapidly.

Most software formats can be accepted, but please check, if you use unusual or bespoke software.

Alternatively, if items are provided on paper, an optical reader will be used to convert them to digital form prior to loading on the Internet. This process is prone to errors. There are many reasons why the reader and Optical Character Recognition software can misread the text and produce incorrect digital form. Typical problems include: poor photocopies (that even a human would have difficulty reading) with faint text and smudges. Hairs, Tipex, and scratches on the glass of the photocopier can cause misreading. The use of unusual fonts, italic, use of frames, boxes and shading can cause reader errors. The software is not as clever as humans at making corrections based on the context.

Paper items can be sent as photocopies of the originals. Preferably they should not be on paper larger than A4 size.

Preparation and Loading
Preparation of the items will result in pages as similar to the original pages as possible. There will be minor differences, that result from the use of different Browsers and Printers by the users, but these should not effect the information content.

For Entry forms, photo images will usually be used because many organisers insist on the use of the original form sent or a photocopy of it. This is the nearest I can get, and the result looks like a poor photocopy (depending to some extent on the quality of the user's printer). However, some forms are difficult to copy this way. Features to be avoided are:

In the most difficult cases, an attempt will be made to 'reproduce' the entry form in the web layout language, HTML. Unfortunately, this will have a different appearance to the original, but it is the best I can do.

Making Users Aware
The new notices, programmes, conditions and entry forms are added as hypertext links from the competition's homepage. A summary of unchanging parts of the notice are included on the competitions homepage.

A link to new entry forms is inserted in the appropriate "Enter Now List" (there is one list for masters, one list for age group competitions) at a position so that it is in order of entry closing date.

Finally a link is added to the top of the "Whats New List" advertising the new information so that it will be the first thing users see when they look at the list on that day.

The Costs
There are no costs.

For Swim Organisers
E-mail: swimsite@freeuk.com
Website: http://www.swimsite.org.uk


Last Revised: 27 Jul 98