OFSAA website flooded with heavy traffic

While there’s little doubt Fort Frances and district has OFSAA hockey fever right now, other parts of Ontario with teams competing here also are keeping a close eye on the action—thanks to the Internet.
“I’ve been blown away by the level of response,” Lincoln Dunn, division manager of Fort Frances Times web design, said Thursday morning, adding the site has seen massive amounts of traffic since the 20-team tourney began Wednesday morning.
And Dunn, who leads the design team that created the website (www.ofsaahockey2006.ca), said he chalks up much of that traffic to the live updates of games available on the site, which deliver descriptions of all the hockey action on a nearly minute-by-minute basis.
“The Times’ site is a pretty high-traffic site, and Wednesday is our biggest day,” noted Dunn. “And yesterday we did three times the Times’ traffic on the OFSAA site.”
“Between yesterday and today, we’ve served out abut 85,000 pages,” Dunn said, adding this total would comprise the number of times the live update pages were refreshed, the number of times people went to the OFSAA home page when they first entered the site, and, to a lesser extent, people checking out the tourney schedule and photos pages also available.
“It’s been great to see how much traffic we’ve been getting,” enthused Dunn.
“I was talking with [OFSAA co-organizer] Greg Ste. Croix yesterday and he said there’s a team from Sudbury, and the school there—all the kids there have laptops—and he said they’ve been screaming over the site.
“All the kids have basically been watching the game through the live updates on their laptops,” he noted.
Dunn added there’s also been much local traffic, including students at Fort High “who have been watching it like crazy,” checking out how their classmates are doing on the ice.
Not only is www.ofsaahockey2006.ca the place to get live game updates, but to check out the tourney schedule and standings, see team profiles and photos, see who the event sponsors are, learn the history of OFSAA hockey, and even order OFSAA apparel.
“You’ll find all of the traditional hockey stat info, like games played and goals against, but you’ll also find the complete game sheet results, with all the penalties and everything, for each game as they’re updated.
“Those are being done as soon as the game sheet is approved by the game officials.
“They’re moved up to a team of volunteers who’ve been working their butts off at all three arenas [Ice for Kids, ’52 Canadians, and in Emo],” Dunn added. “They take those and put the results in the database.
“They’re available within an hour of the game being done.
“But the most effective part of it is the live update,” he said. “It was an idea I had to try and do something a little different than what they’ve done in previous years.
“I’m amazed at how effective it’s been,” he added. “The feedback from people has been really, really positive on that.”
Dunn noted “literally hundreds of hours” have gone into the development of the website, with work on it starting back in November.
“It’s amazing how something that displays information that’s so easily accessible to the public, and is simple and effective, has a lot of things going on behind-the-scenes with the software we’ve developed that enables that to happen,” said Dunn.
“It’s pretty complex for displaying pretty simple stuff.
“It’s been a long process but it’s paying off,” he added. “The site turned out really well and is delivering info exactly how I’d envisioned it would work.
“It’s what I hoped it would be.”
Dunn noted the entire Times’ web design team has had a hand in it, but took his hat off to Fort High student Justin Newman and programmer Reddy Padala.
“There’s no way we could have done this without having [Reddy] on staff,” Dunn stressed. “He brings an unbelievable level of expertise that we haven’t had before. It’s been awesome.
“He’s worked really hard.”
Dunn also noted the website has been a collaborative effort with the local OFSAA committee to get a lot of the info, like the team profiles and tourney history.