/mike

It’s been under wraps for the last month but I am happy to announce that Go! ‘Necks! Go!, the unofficial fan site for the Calgary Roughnecks lacrosse team, is live!

Lacrosse has become my favorite sport to watch over the last couple years — partly due to the fact that I’m not rich enough to fly down to Florida or Texas and catch the NCAA football games I love so much.

Not to take anything away from lacrosse though. It is our national sport in Canada, even though hockey is definitely more popular — for now. Since I started watching lacrosse, the Calgary Roughnecks have managed to go from an expansion team to league champions in only 5 years. Not only were they the champions in 2004 but they also have numerous Western Division titles during those 5 years as well.

The reason I started gonecksgo.com was firstly out of frustration. I was bored with the official Roughneck website. It was outdated and the design/layout did not do our champions justice. At one point I was hopeful that I would be working in the official website for our Roughnecks but it turns out I was waaaay off.

Just before the 2006 season began the organization revealed their brand new website, built by Infinity Pro Sports. Much to my chagrin it didn’t make many improvements.

Sure, the design is improved over the previous site but these are some of the areas I had hoped would be fixed and were not:

• Semantic coding: using proper headline elements (h1, h2, etc), paragraphs (<p>), and proper emphasis and bolding (<strong> and <em>) just to name a few
• CSS based layout: using CSS instead of tables for layout purposes
• Overall adherence to web standards in general

Maybe I was expecting too much. Regardless, what’s done is done and Go! ‘Necks! Go! is just getting started. Gonecksgo.com will be a place for fans of the Calgary Roughnecks to submit pictures of the team and games, post and read game reviews and news about the team and league, as well as be a sort of hub for Roughneck information. Check out the site and if you have any suggestions, let me know.