JK 2009 : Northumbrian Hills

10th - 13th April 2009

About the JK2009 website

As many of you will have noticed, the JK 2009 website uses the British Orienteering website look-and-feel, including the British Orienteering title banner and style of menus. There are two reasons for this: a cost saving from website hosting, and a possible future direction for all major events to use the British Orienteering "brand" more.

Web hosting

Finding an internet service provider with a suitable and cost efficient web hosting package for a major orienteering event such as the JK is not easy. It is not expected to require major storage space (a key assumption being that any photographs from the event will be hosted on other sites), but the download bandwidth requirements are non-standard. We expect a small amount of traffic until entries open, then a small ramp-up as orienteers come to browse details of the event, and a huge ramp-up of download traffic in the weeks immediately before the event for download of final details and immediately after the event for browsing results. Most web hosting packages assume a fairly constant download bandwidth over a period of at least a year. We are very grateful to British Orienteering to offer web hosting for free (and they are happy to do so, with caveat of the next point, since their site is big enough to cope with the download requirements).

British Orienteering "brand"

Whilst major events including the JK and British Championships rotate around the regions, there are ongoing discussions about whether there should be at least some central organising staff to better allow experience to be built upon from one year to the next, to provide a smoother organisation, and to provide a more consistent experience for the competitor. Related to this, there are also discussions about whether our premier events should be marketed under the British Orienteering "brand", rather than that of individual regions / clubs (without of course taking anything away from the huge amount of voluntary resource that comes from the regions). Using the British Orienteering brand for the website is one step in this direction, which JK 2009 is happy to take.

Future major event websites

For anyone hosting a major orienteering event, British Orienteering have indicated that they are happy to host the website, in a similar fashion to that of JK 2009. If anyone is interested in this facility, feel free to get in contact with Duncan Archer (JK 2009 website manager) or Caroline Povey (British Orienteering marketing manager).

In brief British Orienteering can provide an event specific login for the website manager to upload their content. Uploaded content is then visible in a sub-directory of the British Orienteering site such as http://www.britishorienteering.org.uk/event/major_events/jk2009/. The content can reference style sheets (CSS, on which the British Orienteering site heavily relies to provide its consistent look and feel) and images (including the main flash banner and the menu icons) from directories on the main British Orienteering site. British Orienteering can also create a sub-domain such as http://jk2009.britishorienteering.org.uk/. For JK 2009 we have also acquired the http://www.jk2009.org.uk/ domain name to give a more concise and memorable web-address for advertising. This points to the British Orienteering nameservers.

JK 2009 was attended by:

JK 2009 was kindly sponsored by: