www.tripod.com
Tripod.com shows up on many web searches and ratings as one of
the best "free" web hosting sites on the internet. Signing up is
free and there are a lot of tools there to help you build really
great web sites. DC-NoVA Tennis was built using one of their
style templates as a start.
Of course, since nothing in life is
"free", web sites hosted here will contain advertising selected by
Tripod.com. You can do
away with this if you want, by upgrading your site to Tripod Plus
for a small annual fee.
htmlgear.lycos.com
htmlGEAR is a service linked into
Tripod.com or can be used on its
own. Basically, its an application service provider (ASP) for
cool web widgets like polls, event lists, feedback, and a host of
other things that make your web pages a little more interactive.
Just like Tripod, ads show up on all the pages provided by them.
At this time, I could not find an "upgrade" option that allows you
to pay to do away with the ads.
 ezboard
www.ezboard.com
ezboard
provides message boards or "forums" for free to any one on the
internet. The boards are hosted on their servers, so its easy
to set up and it will not add to the total disk space your web site
takes up.
There are options to set up more than
one message board and allow your users to post at will, or you can
"moderate", approving each message before it is added to the board
for viewing. There are even several options to change the loop
of the web pages for your message board and you can even upload your
own logo image to really make it look like its just another part of
your web site.
ezboard
is one more ASP that offers its services for free if you allow them
to run ads on your pages. Like Tripod, there is "fee based"
option that does away with the ads, but it runs about $60 per year
which is more than most captains probably want to pay.
Yahoo! Groups provides e-mail lists, calendars and databases for
groups on the web. The services are free and the ads on the
pages and in the e-mails are a plenty. There is no "no-ad"
option I know of, but in reality, its not that bad.
Using
Yahoo! Groups is very easy.
You can set up your team mail list on your own, or just send the
players information and ask them to subscribe by e-mail. Like
most mail lists, each group member can subscribe, unsubscribe and
set preferences on the way they want to get messages from the group.
There are a lot of other things you can
do with your group page at
Yahoo! Groups. One of the best features is an archive of
the messages sent to the group. When players can't remember
when a match was announced via the mail list, they can go to the
page and look at all the past messages sent through the list.
When DC-NoVA Tennis first started, the
thought was that Yahoo! Groups
could do all that was needed. In the end, the only reason DC-NoVA
Tennis was set up as a web page was because the
Yahoo! Groups page is not
very attractive or flexible.
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