[mygolfbuddy]

MyGolfBuddy.com is the place to find local golf knowledge and hook up with golfers in the places you travel and at home.

You can also track your handicap, book discount tee times and more, check it above each of the local Wrx chapters or here at http://www.mygolfbuddy.com/

Click the links below to check out some of the public tools, many more features, including advanced searching by golf partner preference become available after you register for free!

Search local golf partners by zip code

Search golf partners by city and state

Search local golf courses

Search discounted online tee times

Search golf courses by city and state

Search golf courses by name

Search for practice ranges by city and state

[Aceboympk]

The concept for your site is good, but it isn't an efficient way to search for a golfing partner. None of the demographic information entered in a user's profile is available for a visitor to use for filtering and the lack of querying/filtering makes it a cumbersome tool.

Instead of the free form text boxes I suggest you use fixed values from which the user must select a value. That will make the answers useful for querrying. Searching on free form text is a nightmare so you'll need to analyze the data in profiles and determine which value sets would work best for the questions. Unfortunately you'll have to do an ETL on your database, but it will make your site more useful over the long term.

Here are the data points I would like to use to query. Users can use the filters or not.
1) Sex
2) Average score (for those players not familiar with USGA handicap RULES, the handicap isn't really useful. You may need to bracket these values in ranges of 5 or 10. For example, 71-80, 81-90, 91-100, or 75-80, 81-85, etc...)
3) Age (I don't think a 20 year old is going to want to play with a 40 year old...and vice-versa)
4) How serious does someone take golf (like to joke around to dead silent while playing. Here you're getting into personality profiling which is tough, but face it, do you want to golf with someone that doesn't fit the style you enjoy? That's the biggest issue with paying $85 to play golf with someone that your personalities don't mix well and now you also have to spend 4-5 hours with them. Disaster.)
5) What tees do you play from (Tips to ladies. Probably not a big deal, but the people I've played with always want to know when I join their group.)
6) Speed at which you play (Lightning fast to slow as sin. NOTHING is more upsetting than playing with someone who's speed is so different than yours that they are throwing off your rhythm. It's bad enough that players in front of me are slow, but when someone in my foursome isn't matching my speed it drives me crazy.)
7) Travel Capabilities (This is to find people who are interested in travelling to play. Not that they will ACTUALLY travel, but they are interested in it). This data would identify people who you could arrange a trip. I'm in Chicago and I would REALLY like to find at least ONE person to travel with me to Florida in the Winter because ALL of the specials are based on double occupancy.

The other valuable data you could easily add to your site is when searching by City, State you could list the amount of golfers in the result set. So, if Timbuktu, OH has 14 golfers then you should display that value in parentheses at the end of the City value. Something like this... Timbuktu (14). Again, this allows golfers to quickly find the result set most suitable to them.

Adding these querying capabilities would make your site more useful. You obviously put a lot of time and resources into your site, so now you can improve the user experience by making it more efficient and effective for players to find someone else to join them for a round of golf that they might enjoy playing with.

Sorry if I come across as a know-it-all, but I'm a Senior Business/Systems Analyst, Project Manager and Software Product Manager and I've been doing this for the past 15 years. These are simply ideas for you to use as a brainstorming session to improve your site.

Good luck with your site. I hope you can make some changes to improve the usefulness of your tool because it's a really good idea.

[mygolfbuddy]

Thanks for your input. Actually many of the search filters you discuss are already available when you search from the members only area. You just have to click the "limit by preference" button from the members search.

I agree with you about the free text search, that is an artifact of the our recently added commmunity software. We are going to turn that text search off, as it adds nothing to the site.

You do highlight the fact that many of our site's features are not easily found, and the site interface needs simplifying. This is something we are now working on...

[silver_yummies]

it looks like this could come in handy some day..... when more people find out about it and add their name to the list.