British Foosball Association

BFA Community - About the BFA

About This Website

The pages on this website are maintained by the BFA for the purpose promoting Table Football in the UK and otherwise supporting the activities of the BFA. It is our intention to make the website self-funding through sponsorship and advertising revenues, with surplus revenue being directed back to the BFA.

As I have been asked many times how this site is written and maintained I have put together a brief 'getting started' guide to writing webpages.

Interested in writing your own Website?

Simple websites are very easy to write and get on line. All you need is a web connection and the software that will already be installed on your computer.

This website is a bit more complex as it employs PHP and ASP scripting as well as a MySQL database. However, the framework was written by a complete web novice in under a week.

Software Needed

To write your webpage all you need is a text editor to write the pages and a standard web browser to view them.

In my experience simple editors like Notepad are far superior to WYSIWYG packages wuch as Microsoft Frontpage or other Office applications, because you have complete control over how your webpage is written.

Internet Explorer is the most widely supported web browser, but others including Netscape and Opera are also suitable for viewing your newly written web pages.

Unless you are lucky enough to have a computer that is always connected to the Internet you will also need to upload the pages you write onto an Internet-enabled server using an FTP package. Although there are many FTP packages that will do the job I would recommend Web Publisher, a free package that is able to scan your web directories and identify the modified files for upload.

A vast source of free packages is available at www.downloads.com.

HTML Tutorial

For an extremely comprehensive and well written tutorial on writing basic HTML webpages check out www.w3schools.com, written by the World Wide Web Consortium - the body responsible for the development of internet standards.

Hosting the Webpage

In order to get your webpage onto the internet you will need to host it on a web-enabled server, which will run 24/7 and will assign a static web IP addresses to your domain name.