One thing that has been requested in the past is the ability to let owners add in other admins and users on their own.  We have added in the ability to do this now.  Go into the admin area and go to “Options” -> “Member Associations”.  At the top you will see a form to add in a new user association.  Type in the username, select what association they will be, and click add.

Admins can edit the entire site exactly the same as an Owner can.  The only difference is that Owners can delete Admins, but Admins cannot delete Owners.

Let us know if you have any questions or comments.

We have some fantastic news.  We have moved our photo storage to Amazon S3 which allows us to store all your photos (some ~60,000 currently) relatively inexpensively and with easy scalability.  This relieves the storage load from our server and keeps us from having to continually upgrade or add more hard drives to keep up with all the files everyone is uploading.

What this means for you is that we have removed storage limits from your account regarding photos.  So now your 500MB limit only applies to the files on your “Files” page and system images, such as your header, background images, and roster photos.  We will eventually be moving the system images and hopefully the files to S3 as well, giving you unlimited storage space at no cost.

Now comes the fine print.  While we describe this as unlimited, if you start using tens of  gigabytes of space we will contact you to see about a better option of photo or file storage, as the costs do add up, especially now that we have more than 4,000 teams signed up.

The other issue is downtime, which is out of our control.  Amazon guarantees 99.99% uptime, which is great (it means that they try to never be down for more than ~53 minutes per year, or about 8.7 seconds per day.)  That being said, if your photos aren’t showing up, please check http://status.aws.amazon.com/ first to see if Amazon S3 is down before contacting us for support.

We have also utilized Amazon CloudFront as a Content Delivery Network so that your photos are delivered more quickly to your viewers.  If you aren’t familiar with a Content Delivery Network, it is a service that employs multiple servers at locations throughout the world to send content to users from servers closer to their location.  So for our users in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, England, and other locations that are not near our Michigan data center, your photos are now being served from multiple locations throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia so they will hopefully download slightly more quickly. The CDN will automatically find the location nearest to you and serve your photos from that location.

We hope you enjoy this new, awesome feature. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.

We have added privacy settings for your custom pages. You can now set any custom page to be viewable by anyone or by specific user types.  For example you may put up playbooks so only your players can view it or a phone tree for only your parents, or restrict any other sensitive info you may have in your custom pages. In the admin area, go to “Options” -> “Privacy Settings” to update your settings for all of your custom pages.

We have added in an exciting new feature - the Prep Sportswear Store!  We have partnered up with Prep Sportswear to provide you with a team store that allows you, your team, and anyone else to buy embroided and screenprinted apparel, gear, and other items with your team’s colors and logos.  The best part is that you can make money for your team!  You can make between 7% and 17% off every sale.  Stores are enabled by default, and you may turn them on or off in the “Website Features” section of the main options page in the admin area.

To edit your store, go to the “Prep Sportswear Store” page located in the “Static Content” menu (it must be enabled to do so) in the admin area.  From here you can preview your store and visit the Prep Sportswear page located on their site to edit the store colors, logos, and to add in your payment information to begin receiving checks for the money you can make on each sale.  Your Prep Sportswear username and password are the same as your current FreeTeams.net username and password.  If you change your FreeTeams.net password it will not change the Prep Sportswear password.

We hope you enjoy this great new feature and take advantage of it.  There are no minimum number of items to order, and thousands of items to choose from.

We have integrated with Digibug to provide you with high quality prints and other items using your photos.  You can order different sized prints and posters, shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, mousepads, and much more.  DigiBug will then create the products and ship them to you.

To order a print or other item using your photo, simply go to the photo galleries on your site.  Under each individual photo you will see a link to “More Info / Order Prints”.  From there, you can add the print to your shopping cart and then specify which product you’d like, whether a wallet-sized print or a large canvas recreation of the photo.

Currently all your photos are eligible for purchase. If you’d like to remove the ability for users to  purchase prints or other items from a gallery, simply edit the gallery in your admin area and make sure that “Allow Purchase of Prints” is unchecked.

You can also enable or disable this feature for all new galleries you create by checking or unchecking that option when you create a new gallery.

We hope you enjoy this service, please contact us if you have any question or concerns.

With this new addition, we have also changed our terms of service.  The title is the front page announcement for that change.  You can view the terms of service here.  The changes are the section at the bottom titled “Digibug Photo Printing”.  The basic premise is that when you enable users the ability to purchase photos, you are giving FreeTeams and Digibug permission to sell that image or photo (which you must own or have permission from the photographer to use and sell).  If you don’t want to give us permission, then just disable the ability for users to purchase.

Yes, we are making a little money off of the sale of photos, but not too much.  The reason we are doing this is that it allows us to keep the rest of the site free for you and your users.  We feel that services such as this along with a few small ads are a much better way to money to keep the site running than to charge you a fee for a team page.  It allows us to provide a quality service at an affordable price that is unobtrusive to you and your users.  The permission you give us only goes towards those items that Digibug sells.  We are not selling your images and photos to marketing firms, or using them in any other way.

We’ve had a few requests to make photo galleries a static option.  While we think there are cases where this is needed, we also think there’s still quite a number of times when photos are topical only for a particular season (team and player photos, specific game photos, etc.)  As a compromise, we’ve created a new feature in the galleries that will allow both.  There’s a new “Sticky” option that appears when you are creating or editing photo galleries in the admin area.  If you choose to make a photo gallery “Sticky,” it will show up in every season on your team’s website , regardless of which season it is associated with.  Also, to make them easy to edit, all the sticky galleries will show up in your gallery editor in the admin area, again regardless of which season they are associated with.

We hope this makes things a little easier and a little more flexible.

We have a new partner here at FreeTeams.net - Fun Photo Certificates.  You may have seen their ads on your site.  They are a company based in the UK that does business worldwide.  Here’s a little info from their website that sums up what they do:

Fun Photo Certificates Limited produce and deliver high quality photo certificates. Our certificates are suitable for everyone and are a great and original alternative to greeting cards.

You create the certificate online and we post it for you. Our certificates can be sent for any reason and you can write anything you want on your certificate.

Please check out their site at http://www.funphotocertificates.com/. You can preview various certificate in 6 easy steps, and again, they ship all over.

One thing I’d use them for that immediately popped into mind would be a great quality but inexpensive end of the year gift for my athletes, maybe with a team photo or an action shot.  I know I still have my little league and youth league soccer team photos from a couple of decades ago stored safely and really cherish them.

You can now delete as many of your own websites as your heart desires.  The best part?  You can now do this without having to deal with the (sometimes very slow) tech support department.  On the main options page of your admin area (the first page you see when you are editing a website, or go to “Options” -> “Main Options”,) you will now see a “Delete Website” field at the very bottom of the page.  All you have to do is click that little button and “poof,” all your data is no longer available.  Make sure you actually want to do this, as we may not be able to recover any data.  Our garbage (your old data) is taken out routinely, so don’t assume you can go dumpster-diving to find any old files like you can on your computer.  We’ll try to implement a backup system soon where you can download all your data just in case you’d like to have it for nostalgia’s sake or in case there’s a zombie attack and our servers don’t survive.

I’ve added in the ability to upload your own favicon - it’s a small detail but it helps you brand your webpage a little more to your liking.  Don’t know what a favicon is?  Look up in the URL bar (where you type in web addresses, like http://freeteams.net .)  To the left of the website’s address you should see a little icon.  The FreeTeams favicon is a combination of the letters F and T on a gray background.

You can now upload your own icon under the “Main Options” page.  It’s located at the very bottom of the page under the news feed settings.  You can upload either .ico, .gif, .jpg or .png files.  We highly suggest sizing your favicon to 16 pixels high by 16 pixels wide.   If you already have a logo or icon you want to convert or see how it would look as a favicon, you can create a favicon using this handy online generator at http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/.

We hope you enjoy this little extra addition.  If you’re still in the dark as to where the favicon is, I’ve included a screen shot of one of our demo pages, and I’ve uploaded a baseball as the favicon (it’s directly left of http://freeteams.net/baseballdemo/ ).

We’ve increased the amount of space you have to upload your files and photo galleries from 300 megabytes to 500 megabytes.  We’ve also updated our file manager a bit to look a little nicer.  You can also now create subdirectories in the file manager as well.  Enjoy!