Home Page Updates

Just a quick update about GolfStakes.com. We've created a few more videos to help users learn how to use the site and it's tools. Right now on the home page, we have an introduction video that quickly shows how to score your golf rounds via a mobile phone.

By watching this short video you can get a good idea of what the site can do. You can also click on the link under video to go to a full size version of the video and from there you can watch other video tutorials.

Look for more site updates in the near future.

Updates and Upgrades

Friday has been a busy day for Golfstakes.com. We've just deployed a new version of the web site and we're excited about some of the new features, looks and what not.

First the home page has been changed up some. We've added in our new logo which we will use for all types of branding on both the web and at golf courses where we're at.

Secondly we've adjusted some of our feature descriptions to be somewhat clearer in what we are offering:

•    The ability to track golf side games on your cell phone
•    Fast score entry on your mobile device or computer
•    Multiple side games to choose from
•    Calculate results for your golf league
•    Calculate results for your golf tournament
•    LIVE leader board that automatically updates

As you can see, with the new logo, fewer ads, and a new home page graphic we're trying to get to a much cleaner and friendlier look to the web site.

Now playing videos

To help make it easier for users to learn how to use our tools, we've gone out and created a series of video tutorials. Several of these videos are short introductions into how to do a very specific thing while on GolfStakes, and others are more in depth end to end walk through.

Course Information

Now for sometime we've had the data for nearly all of the golf courses in the United States, but we didn't really have a good way of displaying that data. In this update we've added a lot more information to the courses home page.

Each course now has a full location, phone numbers, address, associated maps and a link to the course web site. Courses can now have a rating for features such as the pace of play, the hospitality and the scenery.

User provided descriptions are displayed with each course to give you a real feel for what the course is like to play, the best holes to look for, and other types of information.

The course details give you quick information about the main contact, how many holes the course has in regulation, the greens fees when and who designed the course.

Last we display our new score card which shows the handicap par and distances for each hole.

As a side note, since players are the most valuable source of informatino about a golf course we've also added in the ability to leave a comment about a golf course.

Your user page

We've adjusted the user's home page. Not only do you see your friends, the latest rounds you've played, articles from Fox Sports and site wide information, we've included an area for you to view your latest statistics.

We show you the number of holes that you've played in the past month, and how many Albatross' , Eagles, Birdies, Par, Bogies, Double Bogies and Triple Bogies that you may have scored during this time frame.  In the future we're looking to add in the percentage of greens and fairways and total strokes for each hole.

Wrap Up

If you have any questions about these new features we've also added the ability to have user created chat sessions with GolfStakes.com repesentives who can walk you through any or all steps of creating an account, setting up a round of golf, creating your side games and getting out on the course to score your game via a cell phone.

Hope to see you all on GolfStakes.com soon.

Upcoming Features

So we're working hard on getting some new features up and running here at GolfStakes.com. First we're looking at opening up all of the course information for users to edit. Currently we have a database with over 17,000 golf courses, but we would like to have our users to be able to edit and add  new courses. This was a problem because we didn't have a way to do this with the new course information. Well now we're developing pages that will allow a user to not only add a new course to our database, but to edit and change our existing data.

Second we're looking to make some more changes to the golf statistics section. Some people have mentioned that they would like to have total count of the number of holes played, along with a percentage of each type of score (par, birdie, bogey, etc).

Third we're looking to add in some Flash animations on the front page to make the home page a little more attractive and interesting when you first visit the site. Let us know what you think of this idea.

Last we're looking at adding a golf bet glossary. Seems like with the number of bets we have, a lot of people just don't know what the bet is, or don't know how to play a round while using the side game. We're looking at having a series of articles explain each bet in some detail and how to GolfStakes.com to score these bets.

That's it for now, look for the updates in the near future.

The Leader Board

So everyone like a good round of golf. But when the round is over and we're all at the Pro Shop, the big question still remains, who won?

Well we here at GolfStakes.com have come up with the idea of a live updated leader board that not only shows who's playing on what hole but displays real time scores.

The first thing you can see is that we give you a short description of the Course, the name of the round, and the date of the game.

Second, we display all of the side games that you've picked to be included in your round of golf. This displays the type of game, how the bets are calculated, and if you're using Net, Gross, Team, or Individual scoring.

Last, the total score for that bet is broken down for that player along with the total number of holes played.

As you can see, you don't have to play an entire round of golf, the calculations are correct even if you play just a few holes of golf.

The Score Card

When playing a round of golf, one of the most vital pieces of equipment that you can have is, a score card. Yes, it's that scrap of printed paper that you will take and scribble on for a the next couple of hours. You will record not only your scores for a hole, but who's up next, who is down, how much someone owes someone, what the next bet is, actually pretty much everything will end up on this piece of paper.

Well as we all know, each course has it's own version of a score card. Different colors for the tees, maps of the course, the layout of each hole, etc. What we try here at GolfStakes is to give you the ability to customize a score card for the courses that you play. Take a look at our up and coming score card found on the Course Home page.

What we've done is changed our display to look more like the score cards you're used to seeing handed out on a course. We hope that you enjoy the new score card and please feedback is always welcomed.

A new logo - a new brand

Since we've started GolfStakes.com, we've always had a hard time trying to brand ourselves. Well we commissioned Rich Paul, (www.richpaul.com) a freelance graphics artist, to create a new logo for us so that we start re-branding GolfStakes. I'm proud to present the new logo below:

We went through several rounds of development on the logo, always wanting to keep several key elements such as the ball dropping in the hole, the flag and the dollar sign as part of stakes. Rich did a great job, and we're happy to have our new logo. Soon we'll not only have the logo on our web site, but also on many other items.

Oh my, videos on GolfStakes.com

You can now view our first video out on YouTube and see how to edit course information on GolfStakes.com. You can watch the video here, or go straight to YouTube. We're working on getting a handful of educational videos posted on the site soon that should over the entire range of setting up a round, setting up your side games, scoring and golf course management.

How to edit golf course information on GolfStakes.com