ClubSiteFootball was first conceived as a solution to what is a common problem for all small clubs and organisations with a web presence. Often they find themselves lucky enough to happen on an individual with the relevent expertise to build and maintain a website for them. However this is no small task, and if the web-master ever leaves the club/organisation then often the site stagnates. The internet is full of sites that not been updated for years. They have effectively been left to die.
This is exact situation the Leicester Academicals Football Club found themselves in. They are a Sunday league side who play in the Leicester Alliance Football League. The club built and maintained it's own website from 2000 but struggled to keep it regularly updated after the original designer left and handed over responsibility.
This was where I came in as a player for the Leicester Accies. I have a keen interest in web technologies and realised that it was an ideal opportunity to escape from manually updating the site myself and hopefully give the club a web presence that they could easily maintain after I had left. The solution was turn the site into a web application. This is different from a normal web-site in that it isn't a collection of static HTML files, but it is a program that physically runs on a web server and dynamically constructs the pages that you see in your web browser. Over the next year I learnt all about Active Server Pages (ASP) and ASP.NET, and began to design and code the application. It grew enormously in scope from what I originally intended, but I enjoyed the learning process.
The final 'product' was finished towards the end of the 2004-05 season, and then I sat back and allowed other members of the club to update the site, and to transfer of all of the data over from the club's previous website so none of the results, player-stats or site content from previous season's were lost.
After a short relaxing break, I realised that there could well be a big demand from the thousands of amateur football teams around the country for a similar web application, so the idea of ClubSiteFootball was born. I am currently working on a similar idea designed specifically for tennis clubs.