Folkestone Invicta relaunch website

Over the past few months, without any publicity about the fact, Ryman Premier League club Folkestone Invicta have been creating, formalising and building a new official club website with a view to replace the old site so ingeniously created by Dave Addison six years ago.

In the past six years the site has gradually evolved and grown to meet the needs of the growing Internet phenomenon and the vast amount of people now having 24 hour access to it.

Primarily, it has been available to give the fans of Folkestone Invicta and non-league football a greater amount of information about the club and promote the it to a wider audience to make them interested in the club and the entertainment it has to offer.

The introduction of the Press Team in January 2006 has bought the website and the deliverance of information about the club a stage forward and has provided fans with the information which was originally lacking in the site and around the club when the website was first created.

It has also meant that the old website became outdated and unable to meet the demands of the supporters and Internet users and for this reason this new site has been created.

To officially launch the new site, the Press Team spoke to club official Andy Ingleston who reflected on the past six years and how the site has evolved to what it is now.

“When I joined the club we were very much still in the dark ages off the pitch, we needed to communicate better with the fans and the easiest way to drag the club kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century was to create a website,” he said.

“From my point of view, technology moves on and I think we need to continue to keep the whole football club abreast of technology and I think there are far better ways of communicating information in terms of speed to the fans and if we can get our message across quicker, then it will keep the fans content and hopefully more people will come through the gates.”

Nearly all semi-professional football clubs at every level have websites and it has changed the face of football in terms of providing the fans with information about the club on a daily basis.

It is also accessible to all fans, who are interested in the club, not just those that live in the area and this was a point picked up by Mr Ingleston.

“The Internet has benefited the club because its boosted the whole profile of the football club and on a busy day we see 600 hits on the site,” he said.

“The Internet is able to reach out to most parts of the world and its not just about reading in the Folkestone Herald what’s happened in the last week, somebody in Zurich, Madrid or New York could then follow Folkestone Invicta Football Club.”

The site was created in conjunction with club officials and the website team and has taken since the end of last season to come to fruition.

Progress in the first few months was slow as the designs were created and a designer was found, but once the site was started, progress was quicker and content had to be added to the basic design that was created.

The key aspect of the site is to give prominence to news stories and get information to fans about the club in a concise and accessible manner.

Andy Ingleston gave his thoughts on the site, adding: “I’m extremely pleased with what has been created, its crisp, its fast, its all the things that a decent site should be and I’m proud it’s our site.

“The injection of youth into the site and those that maintain it has bought a breathe of fresh air into the football club and we have been able to reflect that into this new site.

“Five years in website terms is a long time and this is no disrespect to Dave who was originally running it, but it was getting out of date and it needed to be revamped to keep up with demand.

“The one thing that the website has done in general is get more people involved in the football club because they know what’s going on and I hope it’ll get the Press Team articles onto the site quicker and easier to read and therefore getting the news out to the supporters quicker and this is giving the fans exactly what they want.”

Content in the site will continue to be added over the next few weeks as the season begins to complete the website.

Before the introduction of the Press Team, news filtered through to the fans about the club via the Folkestone Herald and this often led to confusion and annoyance from fans because stories about the club would only be available once a week, and this meant buying a newspaper.

With the Press Team and the website working together, it has meant that fans can obtain up to date information about the club at the click of a button, at their own convenience.

Mr Ingleston explained: “The Internet is the most important tool we have available to communicate the information because in the old days the two local newspapers were the only means with which we could communicate what was going on around the club and this was to a relatively small amount of people.

“You can communicate worldwide with the net and makes it accessible to any supporter, not just those of Folkestone Invicta.

“The introduction of the Press Team has definitely made my job easier because I don’t have to come to the football club to find things out, instead it’s been done for me and I can be doing something more important for the football club. Rather than have to spend half an hour getting in my car, going over to the ground, picking some information up and then going back again and chat to Neil about what’s going on, I have already found the information out via the website.”

The Press Team was formed by the club in response to the departure of Jimmy Dryden last Christmas which at the time bought confusion and uncertainty to the fans as to the direction of the club in the long-term.

It was up to Mr Ingleston at the time to relay facts and information about the story to the fans, which was an inconvenience to the director.

He explained: “A perfect example of my role before the Press Team was the Jimmy Dryden saga back at Christmas. I had to write something on the forum about what happened after Jimmy had left and I could not write that at the time because I was privy to private information.

“If we had had a Press Team back then, then there would have been far lass animosity towards the club from the fans.

“The fact that we did not communicate information with the fans created fuelled rumour, which creates bad feeling amongst everybody.”

“The fact is we do not have enough people helping out around the football club and the more people we can get, the more organised we can become and the more we don’t have to rely on the minority to push this football club forward,” he said.

The club would like to thank Tom Brasington for creating the outlay of the site and putting plans into a cohesive website, Dave Addison for continually being of assistance when he has asked and Sam Jones for giving a time consuming amount of effort to upload all the information about the club, which will continue as he takes over from Dave Addison in updating the site.

www.folkestoneinvicta.co.uk