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Origin of the Site
My interest in this site began in the spring of 2001. Tired of waiting to play at Schenley park, I considered playing elsewhere. Unfortunately, I didn't know of many other courts in the area, especially quality courts with lights. I began looking for courts at tennis websites such as the city of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh.com, and John Valentich's site. These sites list many courts but I didn't know the city well and so I needed to locate each address on a map. I found this process time consuming and found many of the courts too far away. It struck me that a website featuring maps would be valuable to many people and so I began to put something together. Building the site has taught me a lot about the geography of Pittsburgh and has taken quite a bit more work than I anticipated.
I also took up this project to experiment with information design. The web community has come to accept small, quick loading pages as the preferred way to design web sites. This practice often leads to sites detailing a single concept through many pages and requiring the user to visit numerous pages before reaching an important piece of information (e.g. realPittsburgh.com requires numerous clicks to get the address of one court). This site on the other hand features relatively few, larger pages that provide maps, addresses and court conditions together. The size of the pages may cause the pages to load slowly in a browser, especially when using a phone modem. The slow loading is offset by the speed that a user can get information about the courts. A usability report by Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering has shown that web users do not like sites that make them repeatedly drill down to get information. In fact they tend to perceive such sites as slow regardless of the actual load times. Hopefully by providing information about courts up front, users won't be frustrated with this site. I'd love to hear your input on these ideas.
About the Creator
My name is John laPlante and I'm the creator of this site. I have gained a lot of satisfaction building the site, hunting down the information, and talking with contibutors. It has allowed me to focus on my passion for tennis and experiement with design, especially related to user interaction and the information architecture.
Professionally, I work at CMU doing Flash programming. Maybe I'll add some video or some interesting rich interaction :).
In my free time, I play a lot of tennis and I also like roller hockey, taking photographs, talking politics and what not.
Features of the Site
- Allegheny County mapped into 9 segments
- Navigation using a iconic map of the 9 segments and by clicking on the links neighboring each county map.
- Tennis court locations shown on the county maps identified with condition, indoor, and lighting
- Tennis court hyperlinked from the county maps to more detailed descriptions of the courts.
- Detailed desciptions of courts layed out in a tabular format accompany each county map. These descriptions include the court address, number of courts, lighting, surface, indoor / outdoor, condition, source of the content, latitude and longitude.
- Sortable columns in the detailed descriptions include name, lighting, indoor / outdoor, and surface.
- An individual detail page for each court that includes three local maps of varying resolution to help pin point the court location.
- An About this Site page that explains how to use the site and provide a means to provide user input.
New Features
- Updated the 9 main maps to show the location of all the courts in the database and added image map links to all of them. (September 14, 2003)
- Updated the list of courts. There are now 207 courts listed (7 of these are retired). I added maps for about 50 courts where they were missing. (August 23, 2003)
- Added 32 Additional courts to the database and deleted seven that no longer exist.
- Added facility for including photographs and photos for 15 courts. I still need to get photos for most courts.
- Improved court data for a dozen courts.
- Made a new home page with better instructions.
- Refined the layout and typography on the individual court pages.
- Added latitude, longitude and the sources of information to the individual court pages.
Planned Features
- Tie players and play more closely with courts by informating my audience about opportunities including clinics, ladders, leagues, player directories, lessons, and tournaments. Much of this content can be found on the Tennis in the Burgh site but I receive regular requests for information on these topics. Also, associating location with events can be a barrier to participation, especially for people who live outside the Pittsburgh center.
- Create a menu navigation system to provide navigation to more kinds of content and views into existing content. I want to add a number of features to the site and need a navigational system to provide access. Some features I'd like to add include adding a full listing all 207 courts on one page, a listing of the best courts, a site search, and links to the opportunities to play that I've listed above.
- Add a form for submitting comments.
Would be Nice Features
- Build online tools such as a matchmaking service and a online, virtual tournament. I've been researching this idea and have concluded that these services could be popular but the detaisl are hard to get right. Given time and some experimentation, I will probably develop some of these tools.
- Display icons on the maps as DHTML layers so I could automate the process of court placement.
- List court conditions in a layer upon a rollover of the icons. This would display the information more directly.
- Allow users to add and update information on the site
How I Built the Site
The building of the site consisted of research, design, and development time.
Research primarily consisted of using the to locate tennis courts in the county. The following websites were the primary sources of information;
• John Valentich's site
• Pittsburgh.com Courts [No longer feature courts]
• DCNR Courts[Hard to yse as ever]
• City of Pittsburgh
After identifying all these courts, I used MapQuest, Yahoo Maps, or Google Maps to make a positive location identification. This is where I got the detailed local maps. I also recoreded the latitude and longitude coordinates for each map. I hope to use that information to populate the Pittsburgh Greenmap with tennis information.
I designed layouts for the county map pages, the individual court pages, and the home and about pages. The layout fit with the county map sizes. I wanted the maps to be big enough to easily read. The site doesn't have a great deal of navigation due to the design basis of minimal drill downs. This simplicy of interaction simplified the layout. The iconic navigation and home pages were added towards the end of the project to allow people to quickly reach a county map page. The county map pages tend to be large and so I wanted to allow people to go directly to the one that most fits their interest.
Column sorting was added early in the design phase. I assumed at that point that the entire list of courts would appear at once. Adding sort was meant to allow users to narrow in on courts that had a feature such as lights. To reduce file sizes, I later reduced the tables to list only the courts shown on the displayed map. While the Pittsburgh map has many courts and sorting is valuable, some of the other maps have so few courts that sorting becomes much less important.
Development of the site was done using a simple text editor. I wrote a Perl script that reads in a database of court information and outputs all the HTML pages with that data. The county maps were hard coded into the Perl script while the local maps were named in the database and I referenced them in the code.
I could have made the Perl script dynamic so that the pages would be produced when a user requested the page. I chose to do it in a more batch style to reduce the browser load times and because I saw the data as largely static and so didn't need to be generated dynamically. All the maps were produced from MapQuest (thanks a bunch).
Send Comments
The site surely has errors and omissions. I gathered data from a variety of sources inlcuding websites such as DCNR which I know to have some inaccuracies. Verification proved quite difficult without actually travelling to each of the sites. After travelling to a few courts, I reconsidered that idea.