New KeepMyGolfScore.com 19th Hole Golf Blog Launched

March 10, 2006

The KeepMyGolfScore.com 19th Hole Golf Blog is now officially online! The inaugural post marks the update to the vastly improved and comprehensive KeepMyGolScore.com Golf Score Tracker.

We (my friend Matt and I) originally launched the site in 2001. At the time I was basically just a standard web designer with a strong graphic design background. I knew HTML, I could implement Javascript, and could put together basically any kind of static page. But, I had not yet started getting into PHP and database programming to produce dynamic sites. Because of this, another friend of mine helped with the PHP/database programming. The concept for KeepMyGolfScore.com was to charge people a yearly fee to use the site. Unfortunately neither myself nor Doug had much experience setting up credit card processing and payment gateways and the work was just never completed 100%.

Fast-forward a couple years to 2003 and I went into the code and removed all of the credit card and purchasing areas thus making the site free to join. A bit of encouragement came our way when a couple hundred people signed up for the site. At the same time I was starting to learn PHP and decided that, because of the encouragement from people signing up, and the fact that it would be a great portfolio piece, I decided to completely redesign and redevelop the site in late 2004.

Now (within about 18 months) thousands of new golfers had joined and upgrades, refinements, and improvements have continually been made to the service. Adding to the breadth of stats incorporated into KeepMyGolfScore.com are several new updates that have been introduced for the spring golf season of 2006. Perhaps the most exciting update is the addition of graph displays. The new graphs are displayed on the new Stats Central Page, and the Golfer Welcome Page. The graphs show the score, number of fairways, greens in regulation, and putts for the golfer's last five rounds. Now, in addition to comprehensive text stats, golfers can visually see a description of their recent performance using a graphical display. It looks much nicer, too!

A new Stats Central page has been added. This page incorporates the all-time best/worst stats per round that used to be on the Golfer Welcome Page, the graph displays mentioned above, and the top 10, as compared to the previous top 3, rounds all time. New button graphics instead of plain text links have now been implemented, and the KeepMyGolfScore.com home page has been redesigned. And, KeepMyGolfScore.com is now offering the 19th Hole Golf Blog for opinions and editorial on all things golf.

While being able to produce a site like KeepMyGolfScore.com on my own that receives a lot of traffic and praise from its users, perhaps the most satisfying feeling is that it has managed to stay a free service. Our only cost is a small monthly hosting and the time and effort we put into it.

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