 |
--> Letters from Orin & Rob |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
This Page is out of date...please see here for an update. If you want to join DWHoops click here. OPEN LETTER #3 November 8, 2007 Dear Reader, The 2007-08 Duke Women's Basketball season is finally here, as tonight's matchup with Team Reebok marks the Blue Devils' first exhibition contest. It's also the first time that DWHoops will cover a season wire-to-wire, as we launched at the start of last season's ACC portion of the schedule. We are very excited about the level of coverage we will provide, including a trip to cover Duke's regular season opener in Denver this weekend! Generous donations from DW Hoops readers make this added coverage a reality, and we hereby publically thank each and every one of you who helped support the site with your gifts. We hope to cover other selected Duke road games as we are able. After Duke's 2006-07 season ended in Greensboro we thought we'd come up for air and have time to refine the website, but the offseason brought many challenges and opportunities for us. Unfortunately, the biggest challenge that we faced was outside of basketball: Orin's mother lost her yearlong battle with pancreatic cancer on October 4th. Her obituary can be viewed here. Much of the initial design for this website was done by Orin in waiting rooms of doctors' offices and clinics while his mom was undergoing treatment or tests. Her needs for additional care of course took priority over any work on the website over the summer and in the early fall, and for many weeks the site lay dormant. But even as DW Hoops saw few updates after the coaching transition and WNBA coverage ended, it didn't mean that Rob and Orin were idle. First, Rob became a key contributor to ACC Basketball Handbook, providing all of their ACC Women's Basketball coverage. This included preseason predictions, capsules of each team's outlook, and a feature article about the conference. Orin also joined the Handbook team late in the game, providing seven of his photographs for publication. We encourage you to look for ACC Basketball Handbook on your local newsstands! Rob also added a new bi-weekly gig with GoDuke.com, writing feature stories on women's sports. You can rest assured that this new work will will complement and supplement Rob's continued news reporting and game recaps right here at DW Hoops. Rob also continues to publish about the ACC and national scene at FullCourtPress.com and in the print publication Women's Basketball Magazine. But back to DWHoops.com. For the site we've got a number of changes to roll out this year, and circumstance dictates that it won't be all at once. The most visible will be a revised home page design that will make the site easier to navigate, with a dynamic top menu mirrored on future game pages. The least visible, but most crucial from a site perspective, will be our home-grown content publication and stats management system. To provide some history, Orin began designing DWHoops last December as a photo-only site, then converted the site to its current form in one frantic week. Other than the photo galleries (which are created using BreezeBrowser), every page you see on the site was programmed by Orin by hand. So while the look and feel of our game reports will be similar (well, mostly similar), the way it's published will soon be very different. As our reader, you will benefit from quicker publication of content. Orin and Rob will benefit from not staying up all night quite so often. Everybody wins! In addition to getting Rob's text to you faster, we're also going to work towards providing more detailed stats - full player-by-player halftime stats published during the halftime period, our own box score for each game, and up-to-date season stats on each player's profile page. Once this work is done and our new process is in place, we'll be attending to other areas of the site that have been lacking - things like RSS feeds of articles, a better feedback mechanism, a system for e-mail alerts, archives of past seasons game reports, photos, and stats, recommended links, and a section where photos are made available for purchase. So please bear with us during this period of construction and house cleaning, and we hope that by our first anniversary in January that we'll be, like Duke on the court, ready to take things to a new level! Orin Day & Rob Clough OPEN LETTER #2
March 7, 2007 Wow! Has it really been just two months? After 17 games, a couple thousand photos, even more words of recap and analysis, an incredible 125,000 page views, and quite a few 4:00 AM bedtimes, it's time for us to take a breath before the NCAA Tournament. Or, perhaps...not. While we feel our game reports have accomplished our goal of telling the story of each game in a new and interesting way, we've been so focused on (OK, OK, consumed by!) this work that our plans for the rest of the site have noticeably lagged behind. Well, that's finally about to change. Beginning this Saturday, we'll be launching our 2006-07 Player pages. Each page will quite predictably feature a bio, stats, and a gallery of the best photos from this season, but also something different...we'll preview just what we're expecting to see from each player in the upcoming NCAA Tournament. And also a couple of special suprises... Here's our publication schedule for these pages, and the start of our coverage of what we hope will be a long NCAA Tournament run. All player profiles will be published at 8 AM Eastern Time unless noted otherwise:
The Player Pages will be linked from our Front Page menu, and will briefly appear in our "Quick Links" on the Front Page when published. We do have other things to add to the site down the road. A mechanism to present articles and news outside of the "game recap" framework. A new presentation of the many photos I've taken over the years. A history section. More... And, there's even the potential for us to undertake projects outside the web. Our plans are big - but given that we've both got families, real jobs, etc. the realization of these ideas will necessarily come over time. As usual, we thank you, the reader, for your patience. And, especially you, Krista. Those photos of "your teams" will be published soon, we promise! :) Speaking of photos, many have asked us if the photos from the site are available for purchase. We think the answer will be yes...but not immediately. Because of NCAA rules and our personal ties to Duke University, we are prohibited from selling photos of Duke players who are still eligible. Now, that "embargo" doesn't cover photos exclusively of players who have graduated, and it would of course be lifted on Duke's current seniors at the end of the season. We still have some work to do on our photo model, but our current plans are to make selected hi-res digital photos available under license - so buyers can print (or have prints made) for personal use, etc. We also anticipate making certain special photos available under similar terms for donations to designated charities. So, stay tuned... Others have asked, "How do you make money off this?" Our answer is, "We don't, and we don't really plan to." However, we are going to start accepting donations to enable us to defray our costs in improving and expanding our level of coverage. Click here to view our donations page, which has more info about that. And, the most common question* we're asked: "Why do you guys do this?" Quite simply because we love Duke University and Duke Women's Basketball. We have since our undergrad days, back when the team drew in the low hundreds, the band sat at midcourt, and the wins mostly came in the fall semester. The program has come a long way since then, but the basic premise hasn't changed - players giving their all for their teammates and Duke. We're just trying to do the same. I know this is getting long, but we'd like to thank some of the people that have helped make this happen. First and foremost, thanks go to Lindy Brown and the rest of the Duke Sports Information staff. Without access, the site would be far paler - no press conference coverage, no on-court photos, far fewer detailed stats and captions, and many more things that differentiate us from other coverage would be impossible. Thanks also go to Clay Kallam of Full Court Press, who helped make our ACC Tournament coverage possible. If you haven't checked out Rob's articles there, we encourage you do to so. Also thanks go out to the Wake Forest SID staff, who were very helpful in getting us credentialed for the game there, and took great care of us once we got there. On the technical side, we thank Michael Wilson of Mad Dancer Media, who pointed us to our hosting company, and later to the software that we use to make our animated menus. If you ever need a website, he's a great person to consider. Finally, thanks go to you - the reader. Thanks for checking us out, and for coming back for more. Don't be afraid to tell us what you think - we welcome your feedback via the email address listed on the contacts page. Special thanks go to those that bug us when we mess up. You know who you are, and we really appreciate it. Oh yeah, 30-1. Think that deserves a big thank you? We do! Go Duke, -- Orin & Rob * Not including, "Are you guys crazy???"
WELCOME!
January 10, 2007
Dear Reader, We are pleased to announce the launch of DWHoops.com,
where we will provide free full coverage of Duke Women's Basketball.
For each Duke home game, this coverage will typically include photos,
game recaps, and detailed player-by-player reviews. We'll also be
providing written reviews of most road games, additional news &
commentary, and more. We still have a lot of work to do on the secondary features of the site,
and hope that you will "pardon our dust" as our enhancements come on-line.
We hope you have seen and enjoyed our prior Duke Women's Basketball
coverage at Lobsterdevil.com, on the Duke Basketball Report,
at Full Court Press, and at SportsPageMagazine.com, and that
you will now look to DWHoops.com as a place where Duke Women's
Basketball comes first. Thanks for your support, and Go
Duke! Orin Day & Rob Clough
|