My little desk calendar is just about out of interesting factoids to share so it must be the end of the year. This is a time when we all take a moment to review the past year and look forward to what's to come. Well we at eteamz are no exception, so I thought I'd share my reflections and resolutions with all of you.
2006 was a pretty steady year for eteamz, on the outside. That doesn't mean there weren't any important changes.
- We began in January with some really big enhancements to the calendar and schedule admin tools - expanded recurring event options, multiple event categories, shared events for league and org sites and import/export tools for big schedules.
- We added the eteamz Newz page to let our members showcase their latest news and updates on a larger scale.
- We enhanced the Snapshotz program, making it easier to submit your photos for our monthly contest.
- We created a number of special blogs for various major events during the year, including the FIFA 2006 World Cup, the World Cup of Softball, and of course, the Little League World Series.
- We partnered with Shutterfly to create a program called eteamz albumz. This program allows site admins the ability to let their visitors upload photos directly to their site and then view them in a slideshow on Shutterfly, where you can order up prints and all kinds of other great products like photo books and calendars.
- We just ended a special promotion sponsored by T-Mobile to provide free MessageCast calls.
- We added a "Report Abuse" for the community to provide more tools to create a safe and fun environment for all visitors.
- We made some changes to the design of the eteamz Home Page.
- We added a bunch of new player stats for baseball, softball, hockey, soccer, football and lacrosse.
- And just this week we've enhanced our advertising upgrade option to remove the image dimension restrictions so your custom ads can be the size that fits best for you.
And that was just some of the stuff you could see. There was quite a bit going on here behind the scenes at eteamz. Of course we launched this blog to give you an idea of some of those things. We added several new staff at important positions. We did some back-end technology work to improve overall performance. We did some internal re-organization to help improve our own efficiency. And I can't tell you how many times I've moved offices.
So what will 2007 hold for eteamz? Of course no one can say for sure what's to come - and if you all knew, what would be the fun in that?
- Coming in January we'll be vastly improving our site building process to make it easier to get your site set up.
- We'll also be making some changes to our site info pages to help give people a better idea about what eteamz sites are all about, what all the great features are and why eteamz is not just the best place to come to build a web site for your team or club, but why it should be the only place that you would ever need to consider.
- There will be some pretty important changes to the community that will open a whole new world of functionality and ease of use for all of you looking to chat each other up about your teams, your styles and your active lives.
- We'll be developing some new site designs and giving site owners more control over the look and feel of your sites.
There will undoubtedly be much more to come in 2007, so stay tuned for all the details. While there will be some great changes coming this year, some things will definitely not change. eteamz will continue to be THE place for low-cost, easy to build, team sports web sites. eteamz, together with our parent company the Active Network, will continue to be home to the largest and very best participatory sports community in the world. We'll continue to provide outstanding support and service to our rapidly growing membership. And we will continue to listen to the needs and desires of our members and fans.
So, from all of us at eteamz, we close out another great year and wish you all a safe, successfull, and Happy New Year!


