Welcome to the new revamped North West Counties Football League website.

The new design and layout have been developed over the past six months, and contain a wide range of new features and archive material.

Planning for the relaunch began in March, and since then League Development Officer and Website Editor, Paul Lawler, has been working in tandem with Martin Fallon, Runcorn Town Secretary, to design and develop the new site.

Paul has extensive experience in web-based marketing and design through his work in PR, and Martin has a long track record in database design and development, and this combination of expertise – not mention a willingness to spend long hours in the evenings and weekends – has delivered the new site.

Some improvements on the site include:

• More visual approach with match action, ground and team photographs;
• The top 5 news articles appear on the home page with the rest of the news appearing in the NWCFL News Room and News Archive;
• New Match Centre with easier navigation (with the most recent results shown first!). Match centre now includes full league tables with home and away records and the latest based on the last six matches;
• Enhanced club pages, with fixtures, form, goalscoring charts, directions, history, factfiles and detailed statistics from this season’s matches;
• The league archives have been enhanced, with all league tables, previous results and full member records up to the end of last season. Users can also search head-to-head records of previous meetings between clubs (where result is available);
• Better navigation – as well as the navigation menu at the top of the page – there is also a footer containing links to the main areas of the site. You can also click on club names in fixtures and league tables to be taken through to the club page;

Commenting on the new site, Paul Lawler said: “We began collecting feedback on a proposed site design earlier this year and the majority of respondents said leave it alone as the site was good already. However, not to be swayed by the challenge, I still wanted to redesign the site to make it more modern, bigger and better. A team of us sat down in March to brainstorm ideas and little did we know that seven months later we would only just finish the work – the project just got bigger and bigger!

“We have gone for a more visual design to the site to reflect our clubs and grounds in the league. Thank you to those photographers who have helped by providing good quality photos and have really brought it to life. We still need ground images and general football shots so all submissions are welcome.

“The club information on the site has been enhanced, and you can now get full fixtures, form guides and details statistics on each club page. We also have a detailed archive which has all the league tables in the League’s 30 Year history and more recent results. The results archives are still incomplete, so anyone with any missing records can help us build this further.

“Finally, I would like to thank Martin Fallon who has worked extremely hard in bringing my more ambitious ideas to life, and for coming up with some pretty impressive stuff in the process – the site is a statos dream. Did you know it has been 29 games since leaders Congleton Town last got a score draw? I am very proud of the final results, and I hope the finished project makes all of the long hours worthwhile, and the site proves popular.”

Over the next couple of weeks we will be highlighting some of the new features on the site but in the meantime, feel free to look around