The new UK Racketlon website is live, and we couldn’t be more pleased!
We know this has been top of the priority list for a lot of our UK Racketlon community for most of the last year and we’re happy to have delivered in time for the 2024 season.
It’s taken months of work from a lot of the team behind the scenes but finally we have a base for our UK Racketlon community to go to get all the latest Racketlon news and information.
Why did we need a new UK Racketlon website?
To put it bluntly, the old website broke, and we couldn’t fix it. Sometime in the middle of last year, an enforced software update happened on our old web domain and suddenly the UK Racketlon website was broken.
The website was still publicly visible, but this software update meant we could no longer edit pages. We couldn’t add any more news articles. We couldn’t update the tournament entry information. We couldn’t sort the rankings. We knew we had to find a way to fix it.
We asked a few IT experts, and it became clear pretty quickly that due to the bespoke nature of our old website, it was not fixable. We had lost control of the website and would have to start again from scratch.
Why did we wait until 2024 to launch?
We wanted to get the new website up and running as quickly as possible but were dealt another blow. Long-standing chairman Ray Jordan made the decision to step down in the middle of the year. With a new chairman incoming, it was not the right time to start a new project of this magnitude. We couldn’t spend a large amount of UK Racketlon’s finances on a new website without a chairman to oversee this project.
In came Johnny Bispham as Chairman in the autumn and the wheels were in motion. Now we had a permanent Chairman – top of his list was to get the UK Racketlon website back up and running!
So, what did we want from the website? The old website worked very well and was popular. However, it was built well over seven years ago. It needed to maintain that Racketlon core while modernising to 2024.
Why Reforest Hosting?
In the end, our search for a company to work with did not take very long at all. Our very own former chairman Keith Lesser recommended a company he had worked with called Reforest Hosting and immediately we were onto a winner.
Not only are the staff at Reforest Hosting incredibly friendly but they are a sustainable and ecological business. Reforest Hosting is a business that is 100% powered by renewable energy. It also plants trees and protects land as a result of every new client that it obtains.
At UK Racketlon, we are still taking our early steps into making climate positive changes, but why not start at our core. Our website is now hosted by Reforest Hosting, who built the website from scratch with assistance from the UK Racketlon team. Here, we must give a special thanks to Sam Barker, who managed the project and has delivered a fantastic end result!
We also spoke with Reforest Hosting early on about how we want the website to continue to grow. What we have launched this week is very much phase one of a long-term plan to help grow UK Racketlon.
Much like the trees that Reforest Hosting are planting, you’ll see the UK Racketlon website continue to grow over the coming years. If you have any ideas or recommendations for content or pages that you would like to see on the website, then please let us know.
Have a browse of the website at your leisure and we look forward to seeing you all at a UK Racketlon tournament soon!
UK Racketlon Team