User Statistics

Say that you've played a dozen or so golf rounds over the past month. You've used GolfStakes.com to score and record the rounds, but now you're wondering what you hole you made par on or how many rounds you've birdied on. Well now at GolfStakes.com you can see those statistics and more.

Introducing your stats page

As of today on GolfStakes.com you now have the ability to search over the past year for all instances of your golf scoring. You can see the type of scores, how many holes you've played, where you've made those scores at, which round you've scored on the exact date of the score, the exact hole along with the handicap, the par and distance of that hole.

As you can see we also offer and advanced view.

With the advanced view you have the ability to enter a custom date range (start date and end date) and then click on the type of score that you would like to see.

As you can see, that's a lot of information for you to see, but we hope that you can see the benefits of using GolfStakes.com to score your golf rounds.

GolfStakes.com revamp

The backend development has been busy on GolfStakes.com. We've been busy building some management tools for the administration of the site. But we have been able to make some changes for the users of the site that I would like to share with you.

The Home Page

First we've gone and redesigned the home page of GolfStakes.

Gone is the large graphic that dominated the page. In it's place is now a simple area where we have placed information about what GolfStakes is, and short introductory video of the site. Secondly we've change the header of the page to a graphic which we hope demonstrates what we're trying to do here. Making if simple to score your golf games.

A major change came with the ordering of the links in the main and sidebar navigation. All of the links are now public links, which means no more logging in, or wondering why you need to create an account for us. We wanted to make the site very open to the potential user to learn about us, and what we have to offer.

Your Dashboard

The next major thing that we've done with the structure of the site is to make the logged in dashboard a little more user friendly.

What you will see right off the bat is that your statistics, upcoming golf rounds, and your friends list are now in a tabs across the middle of the page. After some thought, we decided that as you accumulated more information about your games, this page would just get too long to manage. So we went with the  tabs. As you can see, the statistics section is now more user friendly also, and you can now see how well you have played in the last 30, 60, 90 days and for the entire year.

The links for access through the rest of the site have also been reorganized. Site Tools contain everything that you will need to create a golf round. No more jumping around from one section to another just to setup a game.

User Tools are now all grouped in the same section, you can view and edit your profile, manage your friends list and change your password.

One last thing, on the dashboard, we have a section called "Do you like this site?" What you can do with this section is to send an email to a friend inviting them to come join GolfStakes. Once they join up, you can then add them as a friend and start creating golf rounds with them.

Hope this is helpful.

Your Frequently Asked Questions Are Answered

I last wrote about having a new section called FAQ's being developed. Well last night we've deployed this new module out to the web site.

The FAQs are broken down by categories such as; General Questions, Course Questions, Group Questions, Side Game Questions, League Questions, Golf Tournament Questions and Scoring Questions.

Under each category you will find a series of questions which will link to a detailed answer page. Some of the answers will describe not only how to use GolfStakes.com but also how to use Mobile.GolfStakes.com (our mobile phone enabled scoring application). Generally we have tried to include a video link on the FAQ answer page so that we can demonstrate how easy it is to use GolfStakes.

Hope this helps.

Frequently Asked Questions

GolfStakes.com is a new site, and since we're new, it would be easy to say that a lot of people have questions about what it is we do, how to use GolfStakes, and what the site can do for them.  Well we're trying to address these Frequently Asked Questions by creating a new section of site just for this type of situation.

Coming soon to a site near you

What we're doing here is giving you, the user, a quick look up area for all of those questions on how to do certain things with GolfStakes. Included with each question is a detailed walk-through of the action being asked about. And usually a short video that can watched to give you some perspective on how that action is done.  Right now we're just presenting the basic information to get someone up and going with GolfStakes. As time goes on, we'll be adding more features such as related topics, and ratings on each of the topics that you are reading about.

Wrap up

So if you have questions about GolfStakes.com or need some help in creating a golf round, setting up a friends list or scoring a round of golf, check out our new Frequently Asked Question section on the site.

Course editing User Interface changes

So the course editing page has always been a large page. Lots of things going on with it, changing the name and address, course details, and most important the tees associated with a course.

Current Look

Here's a screen shot of what the current edit course page looks like.

Now when you're working on this page, you have to do a lot of scrolling and what not. And with our need to start placing even more information on this page, it started to get even longer. So to try and avoid the long pages, we're going to try out using a tabbed approach to this page.

Yeah, we've got tabs

First up is the score card. Everything that you've come to expect on this section is still the same. You will have a listing of all the current tees, and the ability to add a new tee just like before. Nothing has really changed with the functionality of the page, just the look of it.

The second tab is for the name and address of the course.

On this tab, you will have the ability to change the course name, the address, add/remove phone numbers, set the course to private or public and add in it's Ghin number if it's known.

Course Details is the third tab.

Now this tab is where we've really added in a lot more information for you the user to change and modify as needed. From here you can add a contact for the course, specific details about the course like the weekend and weekday rates, when it was built and who designed it, and even to be able to choose which types of grass are found on the greens and fairways.

Last we have a description tab.

We've gone and placed an advanced text box on this tab so that when a description is entered you can have paragraphs, listings, and bold and underline, most everything that you would expect from a simple text editor.

As you can see, at the bottom of tabs, there is a "save course" button displayed. Clicking this button at anytime will save all of your course information and return you back to the course home page.

Hopefully this layout will work out to be much easier for the user to work with and help keep our course database up to date. As always, comments are welcomed and encouraged.

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.