It seems all soccer clubs in my area use the most unlikely platform for hosting their teams - Shutterfly. I wish they weren’t and would love to see Discourse offerings (plugins for turnkey blog, events, rosters, multimedia?) that make discourse competitive to Shutterfly.
Shutterfly makes a big deal out of their Youth Sports offering which includes some compelling features - for free.
Personally, I only know Shutterfly from back in the day when they were the first online photo ordering site I ever used. I sent my rolls of film to them and they then sent me back a CD and put my pictures online so I could view them and order prints. Pretty advanced stuff. I stopped using them when I realized that it was impossible to get the high quality image files back off Shutterfly. Once I got a digital camera my world changed anyway.
Now I am finding myself logging into Shutterfly every week and am getting almost daily notifications about team events, news and content being shared that are important to me - photos and videos mostly, but also some info sharing about soccer skills building etc. It’s killing me.
Sadly, the photos are still lower quality than the originals so are not suitable for printing… unless you order from Shutterfly. Video is also lower quality.
Here are the forums, using an old school forum interface. Submission by email is possible via a common email address. Nobody uses it except the coach.
However, even though the presentation is not very slick I am impressed by the integrated features tailored for soccer teams all accessible via one dashboard. This is really the big selling point for using Shutterfly for organizing soccer teams. It is handy to have the team roster, calendar, availability, key contacts etc a click away.
