General Questions
Listing Content Questions
Operating the Site Questions
Ownership, Motivation, Financial, and Responsibility Questions
| Swimmers Guide FAQ
General Questions |
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To be included in the database, a pool:
And we won’t list a pool that meets all of the above criteria, unless we know its:
For a while, we wouldn't list a facility in an American state that had enacted a so-called "Defense of Marriage" amendment to its state constitution. But reversed that policy when a swimmer who wishes to remain anonymous suggested that he would make a contribution to the Human Rights Campaign for every page view. We thought that's a better way to fight the homophobic bigotry that the DoM amendments represent, so we're taking him up on his offer. And we're going to donate 100% of the advertising revenue we get from those pages to the HRC, too. So, the hate states are back, and every time you check out a pool listing in any of those states, a monetary contribution will be made to counter the bigotry their citizens have legitimized in their state constitutions.
Why have you set minimum criteria for listing?
The principal reason for limiting the number of facilities on the site is to keep the database manageable in size and useful to our target audience (lap swimmers) throughout the year.
It seems that almost every hotel in the world and many health clubs have a “swimming pools”, most of them about the size of a postage stamp. We think that anything shorter than 50-feet is too short for lap swimming. (We call them “Einstein Pools” – keeping track of the number of laps to get in a mile or kilometer long swim gets you into higher mathematics.)
Just about every city and town in the temperate climates has an outdoor, seasonal, swimming pool – most open from May to September in the Northern Hemisphere or from November through March in the Southern Hemisphere. (We’ve read that there are over 200,000 public pools in the United States, alone.) If we included all those pools, the database would become extremely large and cluttered with listings that are of no use for 50 – 75% of the year. Searching the database for a pool that’s open in the “off-season” would become a tedious and annoying process. It is our experience that finding a good public pool in summer is relatively easy, even non-swimmers in most communities know where the local public pool can be found. But finding a good pool after the summer is over is a whole ‘nother question. The primary purpose of the site and database is to help swimmers find pools where they can swim whatever the season.
Who decides which pools to include and exclude from the database?
The decision as to whether or not a facility will be included or excluded from the site is solely that of the site’s editor, Bill Haverland. If he decides to put a pool into the database, it goes in; if he decides not to include a pool, it doesn’t go in. It’s that simple.
Pool operators and swimmers don’t get a vote. Whether the owner of a pool likes it or not, if Bill thinks a pool should be listed, he lists it; If he thinks it shouldn’t be listed, it doesn’t get listed.
How much does it cost to have a pool or team listed on the site?
Nothing, nada, rien, zilch, bupkes. Nobody has ever paid anything to be listed on the site. Nobody has ever been asked to pay anything to be listed on the site. And if we can help it, nobody will ever be asked to pay anything to be listed on the site.
If we were to accept money for including a facility or club, it might (OK would) influence our presentation of its information. We don’t want to give up our editorial independence or to have our judgment clouded by financial considerations.
And if we did accept money for one listing, it might influence our decisions about other facilities (not to list a competitor’s facility or maybe to present it in a less favorable light). In our humble opinion, that would be even worse.
The editorial independence of the Swimmers Guide site’s editors ensures that the information presented is as fair as the editors can make it.
Completed “Add A Pool” questionnaire forms do not interface directly with the database on the Web site. The site editors receive the completed forms from the server and go through them to be sure that the facility qualifies for a listing, that there’s enough information to create an informative listing (see “Minimum Information”) and to attempt to verify that our (and your) legs aren’t being pulled.
We do a Google search to see if the facility has its own Web page anywhere or if there are any clubs or teams that use it as a training venue so that we can include links to their Web sites. We check the Internet and our Atlases to be sure it gets placed in all the right geographical areas, and generally “vet” the listing. When we’re satisfied that we’ve done the best we can, we transcribe the information into our “leads” list. If the information is sufficiently complete, we flag the listing for inclusion in the next monthly update; if it’s not, we keep it on our leads list for further checking at a later date.
Every proposed entry received is manually checked and hand transcribed into our working database (which may explain why we have so many darned typos in the site) – nothing gets onto the site without being carefully reviewed.
If you include your email address in the questionnaire response, we’ll send you an email acknowledging receipt of the information and thanking you for sending it. We may also ask a follow up question or two, but we’ll always reply, and if the listing is ready for inclusion in the next update, we’ll tell you that. If you don’t include your email address (or if you mistype it) you won’t receive a reply.
Your humble servants are not computer programmers, we’ve learned just enough of the program that runs the search engine to make it work, as it. But we specified the original design with the programmer who helped us create it to eliminate the possibility of users ever having to get a “no results meet the specified criteria” response to a query. We hate those suckers and we want never to have to subject any of our users to that sort of a response. Also, unless we could implement some sort of “fuzzy logic” into an open-ended query, a small difference between how we have a facility listed and what you type in could result in not finding a listing that’s in the database. As mentioned above, we’re not computer programmers – fuzzy logic is way beyond our capabilities.
This is one of the most frequent site enhancements requested by users – and surely one of the most difficult, labor intensive, information intensive, and expensive enhancements that could be requested. In order to do it, we would need precise latitude and longitude information for every listing in the database and specialized software to implement it. None of that comes cheap. Keep in mind that for the first seven years that the site was on line, it was totally non-commercial. It had no advertising, no sponsors, and no grants from “organized swimming”. In short, it generated no revenue. The advertisements that were added to the site in September 2003 generate a little money, but not much. Your site editor has a full-time job to support his Internet addiction – that doesn’t leave much time to attempt to collect the data that would be needed to make such a program work, nor enough money to buy software or pay a programmer to make it work.
Although it’s a less-than-optimal solution, the alternative search routines we’ve built into the site (find listings by city or find listings of cities in the counties, departments, and/or provinces) are intended to be as helpful as possible in finding as many facilities within a geographical area. Given our limited time and financial resources, that’s about the best we can do.
When we started the database, we didn’t know a lot about the smaller political subdivisions of most of the countries we ended up adding to the database. We use Atlases and on-line resources to attempt to place the communities in the areas where they belong, but our background is not in political geography, so we’re likely to make errors. Sometimes really egregious errors. If we’ve made an error, let us know and we’ll do our best to fix it. (We’re amazed at how much geography we’ve learned over the years of keeping up the site – and we’re not too proud to admit that we still have a lot to learn!)
An added “wrinkle” to the problem is the tendency in the U.K. to change the boundaries of its counties. We use a 1985 Hammond World Atlas that lists the counties in England somewhat differently from the current actual set up. For example, the Atlas shows Avon as a county, but not Middlesex. We understand that what was once Avon no longer exists in the political organization of England, but Middlesex is a relatively well-defined area near London. This has caused us no end of consternation; we deal with it as best we can.
Canada regularly consolidates major cities’ suburban communities into larger metropolitan cities. We try to pick up on those changes, but we may miss a few.
And, in Australia, the places most people think of as the major cities, such as Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, etc. are not one city at all – at least not the way we think of a “city”. One small community in a large metropolitan area has become an “alias” for itself and for a large number of communities that surround it. Because the other communities may not always indicate on their Web sites that they’re part of a larger, better known, metropolitan area, we may show the smaller community separate and apart from the larger community where is belongs.
In cases like these, if you don’t tell us we’ve screwed-up, we may never find out…
In most cases, lists of geographic locations presented in alphabetical order place abbreviated names in the order they would appear if the full name were spelled out completely. For example, in England, "St. Albans", "St. Austell", and "St. Ivo" would all appear in an alphebetized list of cities before "Sale", because the full name, with the "Saint" spelled-out precedes "Sale". That type of sort requires an additional database field, one with the full name spelled out, to work, even though you may never see it. We do not feel that an additional database field is justified. Further, the adoption of a consistent approach to nomenclature helps us to avoid listing the same city under two different names - a real risk when dealing with so many communities in so many countries. We also feel that the convention we have adopted may be easier for the non-English speaking swimmers who use the Web site. We feel it's better to spell everything out in consideration of our friends around the world who may have only a rudimentary familiarity with our language.
We do the best we can to find every qualifying pool and to include it in the database, but if we haven’t found out about it on the Internet and nobody’s told us about it, there’s not much we can do, is there? And even if we have found out about it, we won’t list a facility unless we have a certain minimal amount of information about it.
We may make an occasional exception to one of the minimum-data requirements – we have a lot of listings that are just “Piscine”, in France, and quite a few listings with “ no street address available” in smaller communities around the world. But we feel that if we can’t provide all of the above, we shouldn’t send you off on a “wild goose chase” for a pool that can’t be found, or that might turn out to be too small, or that may be too short to include on the site.
We do the best we can to include information about the different types of teams that call the pools we have listed “home”, but we won’t include a club or team unless we can include something that someone who’s interested in training with the club or team can use to find out about it. If we don’t have a Web site link for the team or a contact telephone number we’re comfortable publishing in the listing, we won’t include it. Regarding contact telephone numbers, we need to feel confident that the person who owns that number won’t be upset to find it on the Internet.
We spend a lot of time searching the Internet for club information, and it amazes us how many clubs don’t include enough information about themselves to be able to correspond the club to a particular facility. Some include neither the name of the community where they’re located nor the telephone area/city code, so we can figure it out! Every club Web site should include an “About Us” page that indicates where the club trains, and a “Contact Us” page with an email address and telephone number (a street address is helpful, too).
Although computers have gotten much more powerful, there are still some limitations as to how much information we can capture and deal with in our database. There are currently 78 critical fields in each listing – some of which are never transferred to the site, they’re for our use only. But we sometimes get tripped up trying to keep all the information we have already. Given the apparent lack of interest from the diving, water polo, and synchronized swimming worlds - we hardly ever hear from anyone who participates in those sports – we’ve considered deleting the fields relating to those sports entirely. Absent some indication that other aquatic activates that have relatively fewer aficionados would be more helpful, we don’t feel a compelling need to make more work for ourselves at this time.
First of all, keep in mind that the site was developed primarily as a resource for traveling adult swimmers. A adult traveler, whether on vacation or on business, is not going to be interested in knowing the membership prices or children’s admission prices. We intentionally limit the information presented to the “barebones essential” for our target audience – adult and senior citizen “drop-in” prices. Even that information is difficult to maintain; a swimmer will send us an update on the regular adult price without indicating whether the senior citizen rate has changed. Since we know that price changes are usually done across-the-board, when that happens, we correct the regular adult price and delete any other prices we might have mentioned, knowing that what we had before is probably no longer correct.
Swimmers know (or should know) that most facilities have a range of different admission schemes. The fact that we have presented only one of them should not be taken to mean that they don’t offer others. The adult drop-in price is usually a good indication of the relative cost of all the other schemes available and can be helpful in making a “first cut” decision about where to swim – if you’re looking for a different arrangement, use the telephone number provided to find out about it.
The majority of our users are Americans. Americans tend to think the world revolves around them – we know it doesn’t – but by not using the “$” symbol, we’re alerting our compatriots that they need to change gears in their thinking when viewing a listing on our site. Using the three-letter standard currency abbreviations to indicate that the price is not in U.S. $ (USD) is a precaution that we think makes the most sense in the circumstances.
We don’t put all prices in U.S.$ because: a) currency rates fluctuate and b) Americans aren’t the only ones to use the site. There are plenty of Web sites that can be used to find the conversion of prices from the local currency to any other. The three-digit codes we use conform to the international standard codes.
The database was initially developed for traveling adult lap swimmers and to be published in hardcopy, book form. That means that we needed to keep it small and light for packing, and to include only the information that a traveler could use. When we took it on line, we realized that the size constraints we had imposed on ourselves were no longer applicable and that we could include information that might be helpful for “locals” to find pools in their home areas that might not be accessible to travelers, or for people who might be considering taking a job somewhere and want to know whether they’ll be able to continue their swim routines in their new communities.
Don’t misunderstand – our target audience remains the traveling adult lap swimmer, but there are a lot of other people we can help now at no additional cost, so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t. Providing that information to “locals” has the added benefit of encouraging them to send us information that we might otherwise never find out if only the travelers used our site.
Also, over the years we’ve found that swimmers are a creative and inventive lot – some pride themselves in being able to talk their way into any pool, anywhere. In many situations, pools with “no visitors” policies can be talked into making an exception for someone with a really good story. For those swimmers, our “no public access” listings may present just the challenge they’re looking for.
Although we may, occasionally, include other features of a listed facility, we made a conscious decision to focus on swimming facilities. The focus of our site is and we hope always will be swimming pools. It’s what interests us, what we find fun, and the only subject we want to cover. Over the years, we’ve seen thousands of fitness Web sites come and go, many trying to cover too many subjects and covering none of them very well. Adding other subjects that might distract us from that one subject would result in a loss of focus, making us “just another fitness site”.
When we do include other features available at a listed facility, it’s usually as a way to express our gratitude to the individual who sent us the listing information.
Why don’t you include the pool’s schedules in the listings?
We don’t list pool schedules in our listings for two principal reasons:
We know that many people are sensitive to chlorine and would like to be able to find pools that use anything else for sanitization. When we know that a pool is non-chlorine sanitized, we try to remember to include that information somewhere in the listing. We've even thought about adding a field to the database to capture the sanitization methods of the pools, but that information is hard to come by. A quick check of the database in September 2003 revealed that of the 13,000 listings, only 31 facilities included mention of a sanitization system other than chlorine.
How do you know about all these pools? Where did you get all this information?
We started developing the database for publication in a book about pools in the United States in 1992. From 1992 through 1995, we mailed questionnaires to thousands of YMCAs, health clubs, hotels, and municipal pools across the country, and published the results in two editions of a book called “Swimmers Guide”. The second edition had 3,200 listings, all in the United States. That formed the core of the database.
In 1996, we discovered the Internet and started using it as a tool for research. We began learning the ins-and-outs of the various search engines back then, progressing from the original Internet search engines Magellan, Web-Crawler, and Northern Lights, to AltaVista and AllTheWeb.com, and have recently settled on an almost exclusive use of Google.
We first searched in English only (our native language), then expanding to Spanish and Portuguese (which we studied in college), and then expanding to other languages we’ve never studied. We’ve done searches in French, German, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Catalan, Norwegian, Hungarian, Polish, Czech, Slovakian, Serbo-Croatian, Finnish, and even tried a few in Turkish. We’ve tried a few in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, but languages that aren’t written in the Latin alphabet have turned out to be almost impossible for us to deal with – which explains the limited number of listings in Russia, Greece, the Arabic-speaking nations, Israel, and Thailand, among others.
We’ve figured out how to use a variety of Web-based telephone books to find addresses and telephone numbers of pools where we had only names, and to use the telephone numbers in search engines to find their dimensions, addresses, and other critical information.
While working with the search engines on one side, we’ve also received information for hundreds of listings from other swimmers who used the “Add-A-Pool” and “Add-A-Club” pages of our site or by plain old email on the other.
How does the Web site work? Why don’t you update the database more often?
We maintain our “working” database in an Excel workbook on our home computer. The workbook has one worksheet that contains the complete current database of pools that are scheduled to be included on the site; another with “leads” on facilities that may qualify, but lack certain critical pieces of information; another with all the listings that were once on the site but have had to be deleted because they’ve closed, and several other handy-dandy sheets (Fahrenheit to Celsius temperature conversion tables, International standard currency code lists, and even a table with non-English language characters for the names and street addresses of pools in countries where accents and special letters not on a standard American keyboard are used).
When we receive or find information for a potential new listing, we transcribe it onto the leads worksheet. When we’re satisfied that we have enough information to include the “lead” in the next edition of the database, we transfer it from the leads list to the complete database worksheet, and assign it a unique “ID” number.
Meanwhile, we’re continually receiving updates, corrections, and reviews of listed facilities, which are all transcribed into the complete database worksheet daily, as they come in.
This all happens at our home in Raleigh, North Carolina, but our server is located in Arvada, Colorado. The server runs a program called “Cold Fusion”, which can read a database and create Web pages from it “on the fly”, but it’s set up to read MS Access databases, not Excel databases.
Before we can send an update to the server, the complete database Excel worksheet has to be converted to Access. And in order to create the spiffy country, state/province, county/region, city search routines, it needs to have the data from the single Excel spreadsheet split into a variety of indexed and linked Access tables.
(Although it would probably be easier to keep the working database on our home computer in Access to begin with, we find that program to be difficult to deal with, whereas, as accountants, we work with Excel every day and we’re extremely comfortable with it.)
In order to be sure Access will be able to handle the data correctly, we first “index” the geographical information in the database in Excel; then convert the database to Access, then create the Access tables, then link the tables, and finally ftp the database to the server.
If we haven’t made any geographical mistakes, the conversion goes fairly quickly now, taking only a couple of hours from start to ftp. But if there’s an errant space in front of or after the name of a city, county, state or country, or if we’ve placed the same town in different counties in two listings, we have to go back to Excel, correct the error, re-index the database, and reconvert it to Access. The process used to take two days, but computers have gotten faster and we’ve gotten more careful in our data entry.
Then we spend a few hours checking the new database on a test site to be sure we haven’t made any significant errors. When we’re satisfied that the new database is running properly, we “flip a switch”, so to speak, and the new database becomes the “target” of the Cold Fusion program. We also change the “Welcome” page and the “What’s New” pages to reflect the latest date, statistics, etc.
It’s an involved process that takes time. We don’t just “update” the database you see every month; we replace it completely to be sure that changes to listings that were there before are incorporated into the latest version.
Could we do it more often? Sure, but that would be time not spent on finding new pools or corresponding with the people who help us keep the site current. We figure that once a month is often enough.
We’ve loved swimming since we were kids. We never swam competitively, but we found lap swimming to be a great way to control stress and stay in shape, particularly after we completed our schooling.
When we had to travel on business, what most upset us was missing out on our daily swims; we were rarely able to find pools near where we were going and, when we did, the finding took so long that there wasn’t enough time to get to the pools we’d found. Then, in the early 90s, for reasons having nothing to do with swimming, we decided to ditch our stress-laden careers as accountants and try something new.
We thought that there were enough other people, particularly business travelers, who felt the way we do about swimming and about missing swimming while on the road. So we did some research and published two editions of a book called Swimmers Guide. We did the research; we did the writing; we did the page layout; we contracted with the printers; we did the advertising, the public relations, and the distribution. And the second edition (published in 1995) was a “sellout”. We printed 5,000 copies and sold all but about 20 of them in two years.
Financially, however, it wasn’t so great. We recovered almost everything we put into the project, but we couldn’t pay ourselves any salaries and didn’t make any profit. We had a lot of fun, but you can’t eat fun, and it doesn’t keep a roof over your head. We decided to take our licks and get back into the regular working world.
We are neither computer programmers nor professional Web site designers. We settled on a layout that we felt worked at the outset, and then learned just enough of the programs needed to make it work. Over the years, we’ve added many, many things that weren’t in the original layout (Web links, email addresses, reviews, the county/region search feature, map links, temperature conversions, to name a few), but every enhancement takes time to implement.
We made a conscious decision that on our site, “content is king”; we regularly change the database and page layout templates to add content that we feel enhances the information presented, but we’re generally happy with the existing layout and feel no particular need to “jazz it up” or show off programming capabilities we don’t have anyway. Learning new programming and page layout techniques takes time away from what we see as our principal objective – to collect and convey information.
We don’t include photos out of concern that the rights to photographs sent to us by others may not be theirs to distribute. We’re sensitive to copyright concerns and prefer not to risk being sued by the photographer for including photos that may be copyright protected. Additionally, while computers and connections have gotten faster over the years, some of the people who use the site may still be using slow dial-up connections. Jazzy graphics and photographs may take time for those users to download, detracting from their experience in using the site.
Who owns and operates this Web site?
The owner/operators of the Swimmers Guide Web site are Bill Haverland and Tom Saunders, two accountants who live in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. We have been recreational lap swimmers for all our lives and we love to swim. We hold full-time jobs as accountants for private companies and we maintain the database from our home, working on it in our spare time. The site is hosted on a server maintained by Lorimer Network Research, in Arvada, Colorado, USA.
Who pays to keep up the database and the Web site?
All of the research to maintain the database and the content of the Web site is done by Bill Haverland, who is solely responsible for its content. Until advertising was added to the site in September 2003, he has done it without any financial compensation or remuneration whatsoever.
John Lorimer and Lorimer Network Research have provided the host server and did the initial programming to make the site’s search engine work without any compensation or remuneration, as a service to the worldwide swimming community.
John Lorimer and Lorimer Network Research have no responsibility for any of the information in the database, whatsoever.
No other individuals or organizations have contributed financially to the operation or maintenance of the database or the Web site.
I’d like to help support the work you’re doing, how can I help?
We’d love to find a sponsor who’d pay us for doing what we do, but we have no illusions that anybody will come forward and pay us the kind of money we’d need to really do the site right. We’re not interested in “on the come” profit-sharing arrangements with commercial Web site developers who think they can make a lot of money from advertisers – our audience is too small for that to work. And we’re not about to turn over the rights to the information we’ve spent so much time and effort collecting only to find it an asset in someone else’s bankruptcy estate.
We don’t want our users to send us their hard-earned cash, either. We know that the people most likely to be willing to pay for the information are the ones who are already contributing by sending us new listings and updated information about the listed pools. They’re doing enough already.
So, if you want to contribute to the site – send information about new pools to add to the site by using the Add-A-Pool questionnaire or help us keep the information about pools already listed by sending updates and corrections from the “mailto” links on those pools’ pages.
Since the site went on line in 1996, we’ve been trying to find some way to make a little money for all the work we do, but we could never find a way to do it that wouldn’t subject our audience to a lot of annoying Internet “noise”: pop-ups, “jiggly” graphics, and other distracting stuff. We hate that stuff, we see too much of it anyway, and we couldn’t in good conscience lay it on you. One of our regular correspondents turned us on to the advertising program we're using and, after checking it out, we decided that it was sufficiently innocuous to add to our listing pages.
The ads don’t make us much money, but they’re not annoying, either, so we hope you won’t mind them too much. They do help defray some of our costs and provide a little more incentive for us to continue the work we’ve been doing for free since 1996.
In that connection, we request that you NOT click on an advertisement link unless you’re really interested in finding out more about the advertised product or service. As with any Internet advertising service, the advertiser pays “per click”; but they won’t pay for long if the people who click on their advertising links don’t buy their products. PLEASE don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
I would like to buy / rent a complete list of the pools you have in your database in….
We’re sorry; we do not sell, rent, or give away any portion of the core information in our database for commercial exploitation. We have made a personal commitment to the people who send us information that we will never place them on a mailing, telephone or junk email mailing list (ours or anyone else’s). We cannot prevent you from collecting information from the published Web site, but we cannot honor our commitment to our contributors by providing assistance or information to you in any other way.
All rights reserved.
Send your comments and suggestions to Bill Haverland or Tom Saunders at BHaverland@nc.rr.com.
