A friend of mine, who is an avid flag football player and very active amateur athlete, approached me with an idea of setting up an online meeting place for flag football players and fans in the Iowa-Illinois Quad Cities area. This would be a place where everyone involved in the sport could discuss their teams, share information about upcoming events, and occaisionally talk a little trash.

As we talked, his idea morphed into not just a place for flag football, but also for other sports, such a softball and soccer. Since he already had an online classified site called QCStuff.com, he decided to call the site QCSportsStuff.com.

The first, and at this time, the only active part of the site is for flag football, where there is a forum system with a portal page for news and upcoming events, an event calendar that loads the upcoming events block on the portal page, and a photo album. The flag football section is also accessed via the domain name QCFlagFootball.com.

If the football section of the site is well received, then he will want a similar section for softball before the season begins in the spring.

The forum system is phpBB2 and associated mods. For the site, I designed a dark background template, using the colors black, red, and white, logically based upon the default subSilver template of phpBB2. Being somewhat constrained by all the non-compliant markup code in phpBB2, I decided not to attempt to make the site validate under XHTML standards, but I was able to modify enough code to make it all validate under HTML 4.01 Transitional.

This type of site, although complex, is rather easy to set up. So, if you wish to have an online forum for your club, league, fraternity, or any other type of group, please contact me. It might be easier and cheaper than you had imagined.

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To discuss how I can help you to establish or improve your internet presence, please click here to contact me, or call me at 563-650-2547.

Bob Crabb