St Vincents were presented with their McNamee Award for the "Best Club or County Website" for 2007 at a special ceremony in Croke Park on Sunday August 10th.

The McNamee Awards are the GAA`s annual media awards and are an acknowledegement of the excellent work made by those in the past year in the field of communications.

They have been running since 1971 and the number of award categories have increased as the various media outlets expand. This year`s categories were

• Best Local Radio Programme
• Best Website
• Best Club Media Production
• Best County Final Programme
• Best County Yearbook
• Provincial Media Award
• National Media Award
• Hall of Fame Award

The list of winners can be viewed by clicking here.

The club were represented by the website`s creator and resident webmaster, Seán Fox, and Club PRO, Mark Doyle. The award was presented by GAA President Nicky Brennan.

The selection panel commented on the St Vincents website.
"The site has an extremely attractive, well designed Home Page, in the club colours. It provides an RSS feed of site updates and info to members; it has a `printer friendly` feature, something that is often overlooked in web sites; it has a good search facility and a facility to email information from the site to a friend and it makes good use of photos and video inserts.   In addition, the site marshals a huge volume of news and club information in a way that is very easy to navigate.   A truly remarkable web site."

The club website has been on the go since June 2005 and has grown in leaps and bounds as it has evolved to the meet the needs and demands of the club and its members.

There have been to date over 300,000 hits to the website spread over 175,000 visitors in its 4 years. The table below illustrates clearly the growth in the website`s popularity over time. With regular visitors from North America, the UK, Australia and the rest of Europe.

Daily hits to the site were well over a healthy 200 up and till last summer (2007). But after a revamp to the site last August with improved navigation, photo galleries and added video features among the most notable changes the daily hits to the site have doubled to over 400.

This coincided in part with the Senior Footballers successful run to Dublin, Leinster and All Ireland success and the website played its part in helping documenting this journey with club news, match reports, photos and videos. Club members from all over the world were able to follow the success of the team and feel connected.

This is true of all information that is published on the website from news about mini leagues to details about table quizs. The website has become the central source for all club members to follow the club`s activities.

For that to happen, thanks must go to the various contributors to the website who keep the site up to date. In particular former Club PRO, Brid Power and current PRO, Mark Doyle. Special thanks also to Grainne McKinney for all the excellent photographs she has supplied.

The site will evolve further as new technologies and ideas allow for better ways of expanding, improving the site to give the club`s members and visitors an even better user experience. All ideas, suggestions or criticisms are welcome by emailing them to webmaster@stvincentsgaa.ie

Click here to listen to an interview of webmaster, Seán Fox, by Dublin City Radio`s GAA Show host, Mick Hanley, ahead of the McNamee Awards on Wednesday August 6th.