Showcase – Top Gun Flag Football
From 2005 to 2018 Taylor Design provided custom software development and IT support to the premier flag football league of southern California, Top Gun Flag Football. In 2018 Top Gun’s owner decided to retire from the business. While we were sad to see Top Gun close, we’re very proud of being a part of their nearly 13 years of success.
Our business relationship began when Top Gun asked us to develop a solution for managing and publishing their game statistics. At the time they were using a labor intensive process which involved manually transferring data from Palm Pilots to individual Excel spreadsheets; processing those spreadsheets through a command line DOS program to generate HTML report tables; and then manually placing those tables onto new web pages.
Taylor Design outlined a solution to be developed in two stages. In stage one we created a single, intuitive application which could handle the entire process from data import to final page generation. This application imported field notes; processed the raw data into a MySQL database; and exported complete, static HTML pages for immediate upload to their web site. The application presented a rich GUI for reviewing, editing, and reporting on the data collected.
In stage two we converted their static web site to a dynamic one with on the fly PHP generation of game reports. We started by configuring two 1U web servers (one primary, one backup) with Apache, MySQL, and PHP, and installing them at a Los Angeles hosting facility. After moving their existing site, we modified the stats program to sync its data with the remote MySQL databases via a custom made server app. Finally we created a PHP application to query the data and generate reports for web site visitors on demand. Data revisions could be published with a click, and the web site look and feel could be easily changed.
After our success with stats management, Taylor Design was contracted to create a sales system for Top Gun. Again we took data that had previously been stored in Excel spreadsheets and moved it to a MySQL database with an intuitive GUI application front end. This system enabled Top Gun to better organize and track their sales force while simultaneously increasing salesperson productivity.
Taylor Design then produced a small program to make it faster and easier to enter, track, and invoice referee work hours.
Next, Top Gun asked us to automated their game scheduling. We created software that analyzed field availability and team scheduling requests to construct a schedule for the entire season. A task that used to take Top Gun staff several days could now be completed in a few hours. As with game statistics, the final schedule was stored on their web servers in MySQL and presented to visitors via a dynamic PHP web application.
Recently, Top Gun contracted with us to translate their original web site design into a WordPress site to make it easier for their staff to edit and publish new content. So we upgraded their server software; installed WordPress; installed a selection of plugins to support the features they needed; and created their new site using the popular Divi theme.
We focused on preserving everything fans loved about the look and feel of the old site. But at the same time we modernized the look and organized the content to make it easy for their staff to make changes. With the new design approved we integrated our PHP applications for stats and scheduling, merging the WordPress platform with our custom software.
We’re proud to work with Top Gun Flag Football and to produce software that is tailored to their business model while offering the interface and polish of commercial applications.