Building a Complete Website with WebBuilder

Building a Complete Website with WebBuilder

BallStat now has the ability to build a complete website for all your team and players by simply selecting a menu item. All league pages, team pages and players pages will be linked for easy access to the data you want to view. Even if you don't want or need a website this is still a great way to view all your league stats on your local hard disk.

Before you build your website there are a few options you must set. Select Reports/Web Reports/WebBuilder preferences ... from the main menu. On the preferences screen you can set the following options -

Website builder path
Your selection here will tell BallStat where to store the created web pages on your hard disk. It is recommended that you use a folder that is dedicated to just these web pages so uploading to the internet can be simplified to uploading the entire folder. Please note that large leagues can contain over 2000 separate files and can approach 100 MB in size.

Default database to use when building database
This selection is very important as you are telling BallStat which database to pull the stats from. BallStat will only build a website from one database at a time. If you need to use more than one database then create each one separately then link them together with a page you create.

Optional team reports
Select the reports you want to include in your website for team stats. The main team page will always be created and contains links to all the players on the roster. The more reports you include the larger the website will be. If you select to use any of the listed optional team reports a link to each report will appear on the team's main page.

Optional player report
A main page will always be created for each player listing a game by game line for his batting, pitching and fielding stats. If you select to use any of the listed optional player reports a link to each report will appear on the players main page.

General options

Underscore all hyperlinks
Check this option if you want all click able links to be underlined. If you don't use this option you can still click player and team names to go to another page but they won't be underlined.

Break between tables
Checking this box will slightly separate the tables on all the main pages that contain batting, pitching and fielding stats.

Use divisional standings
If you check this box then BallStat will create separate standings for each division in your league and put them all on the main league page (leaguemain.htm). A link to each division will be provided at the top right of the main league page. Separate division batting, pitching and fielding stats will also be created for each team. If this box is left unchecked then every team in your league will be lumped into the standings regardless of an assigned division.

Leader Reports
WebBuilder contains a Leader Report Page that can list as many leader reports as you like. Create your leader reports the normal way (run the CRM once) then select the ones you want by clicking the Add leader report button. You can add text headers to separate different types of leaders reports by clicking the Add text button. When you run WebBuilder the Leader Page and all the selected leader reports will be created and linked.

To create your website select Reports/Web Reports/Build website for entire league from the main menu. There are other options on the Web menu to just build individual components of a website if that is all you need. For instance, if you just want to view stats for a single team then build that team's player pages and the team's main page. Colors and fonts can be selected with the Suite Properties as all pages will be created using the current properties. Creation time varies and can take up to 5 minutes for very large leagues. As a general rule the more players in your league, the longer it will take to create the website. The number of teams won't affect creation time much unless there are a lot of players on each roster.

Important! All links are created automatically from team names and player names. The main league page will always be named leaguemain.htm. If you change a player or team name then the next time you create a website the new names will be used to create the appropriate web pages.