SCEFL and Football Web Pages – Moving Forward Together

Saturday afternoon brought some unusual problems with the Football Web Pages system, which meant that a number of results, goalscorers and other match details were slower than normal to appear.

Football Web Pages have since contacted leagues to apologise and explain what happened. Recent work to improve the back end of their system resulted in an issue when the usual Saturday afternoon combination of hundreds of match updates and thousands of visitors hit the site at the same time.

The change has now been rolled back, with FWP also working since Saturday to recover and add as much missing match information as possible.

From a SCEFL perspective, we remain completely happy with our relationship with Football Web Pages and proud to continue working alongside them.

Problems such as Saturday’s are extremely rare and should be viewed against the huge improvements that the system has brought to the way our competition is followed.

FA regulations mean that ‘Full-Time’ remains the system used for the official administration of our competitions and fixtures. However, it does not provide the live-score experience that supporters increasingly expect on a Saturday afternoon.

That is where Football Web Pages has transformed things for us.

Supporters can follow matches as they happen, while the site also provides league tables, goalscorer charts, form guides, results, fixtures and a huge amount of additional information across the season.

For many years we pushed to bring Football Web Pages into Step 5 and Step 6 football, with SCEFL becoming the first league at this level to fully embrace its system. Since then, many other leagues have followed.

It is a considerable step forward from the heavily manual systems we previously relied upon.

We should also recognise the people who make it work.

Our Football Web Pages updaters around the grounds give their time to provide scores and match information throughout the afternoon, often while carrying out other club duties at the same time. We are extremely grateful for the work they do.

Non-League football is built on volunteers. Whether updating a club website, running social media, providing match information or carrying out league administration, much of what supporters see is produced by people giving up their own time.

So, while we fully understand the frustration when information does not appear as quickly as usual, it is worth remembering the people behind those updates.

Those who have followed the SCEFL for many years will remember just how different things once were. Information could be difficult to find, updates were slower and many processes involved considerable manual work.

We are now light years ahead of those days.

That does not mean we stop looking for improvements. We are constantly considering ways to make our website, match coverage and information better for clubs and supporters.

Football Web Pages remains an important part of that.

We thank Gary and the FWP team for their honest explanation of Saturday’s problems, thank all of our matchday updaters for the work they put in every week, and look forward to continuing our partnership with Football Web Pages for a long time to come.