Places2Swim.com is a website designed to help swimmers find good places to swim, anywhere in the world, at any time of year. If you're a swimmer looking for a new set of black lines to stare at close to home, if you're going on a business trip or a vacation, or if you're considering relocating to a new town or city, you'll find the site helpful.
Places2Swim.com is an aggregator website for full-size, year-round, swimming facilities but, unlike most aggregator sites, we don't simply scrape information or links from other people's websites, stick it onto a page on our site, tack on some advertising, and move on. When we find a swimming pool that we want to include on this site, we spend some time collecting information about it from as many mentions of the pool on the Internet we can find. We find its "official" website and/or Facebook page; we find-out its prices, location, contact information, and as much of a description of the pools there as we can. We map the pool and include a map of the pool's location in the listing. We search for competitive teams that use the pool for training and include links to their sites in our listings.
We often send an email to the pool asking for key information that we can't find on the Internet, e.g., drop-in prices and pool water temperatures. And we do it in the pool's native language (thanks to Google for that).
And, after we've pulled together enough information for a listing, we don't just create a page on the site and move on, we review the listing periodically to ensure that the price information in the listing isn't too far out of date and that all of the links in the listing are still working.
We actively solicit users' assistance in keeping the site current and, when a user lets us know that something has gone stale on us, we review the entire listing and send a thank you note to the individual who tipped us off.
In short, the site is more than just maintained, it's curated.
We've spent over thirty years building the database that the site is built on. We can't guarantee that every pool that qualifies for a listing will be included when you do a search, but you won't find another site that can give you more information about more pools in more places than Places2Swim.com.
Over those thirty or so years we've collected a lot of information, not just about where the pools are located, but also the kind of detailed information about each individual qualifying facility that we think swimmers want to know.
To qualify for inclusion on this website, a swimming pool must meet certain length requirements, length of operating season requirements, and must be open to the public or to groups likely to include a large number of swimmers, either on a drop-in or casual basis, or by membership. (We cover the details of the requirements in the General questions section of the site's FAQ.)
The site is divided into six sections, each of which can be accessed by clicking on its title in the menu bar at the top of the page. The sections and a brief description of each are are described in the Contentssection of this page.
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Hello, Swimming Friends, I?m Bill Haverland and I've been working on the Swimmers Guide database since 1992, first in hard-copy, printed form and then in 1996 on the Internet. When I reached my 70s in the late 2010s, I recognized that all the information that I had collected would be lost if I couldn't find someone to take over from me, when I no longer could. Without someone to replace me, once I stopped paying ISP hosting fees, the information would disappear forever.
To make matters worse, the site was at risk because I lacked the technical expertise to keep the site running properly. The Internet was changing so fast that, over the course of twenty or so years, I would have to hire a programmer to fix the bugs that plagued the site. Every programmer has his own style and programming tricks and the site had accreted about seven layers of not entirely compatible code, making every "fix" more difficult than the one before ? and shorter lived!
Fortunately, in 2019 I was approached by another, younger swimmer who had been following Swimmers Guide since the publication of the first edition of the book in 1993. Brian Webb is a US Masters swimmer and an IT entrepreneur with the software knowledge I lack to maintain the site, the resources to enhance it, and the desire to ensure its survival and growth.
We struck a deal in 2020 when he took over the hosting and the maintenance of the software. Shortly after that, we began working together on the next version of the site.
After fixing the bugs that were causing regular site outages and service interruptions, the first decision we made was to transfer then existing database from its old procedural coding platform to something newer and more flexible. This involved a complete rewrite of the website.
But, before we did that, we took some time to work with a design consultant and to conduct interviews with some active site users. Based on the user interviews, one of the things that our design consultant recommended was to change the name of the site from the possibly misunderstood Swimmers Guide to something more explicit. After some consideration, the team came up with Places2Swim.com as a new, clearer way to convey what the site is all about. We hope that the new name makes it easier for you to remember where we are and what we do!
Transferring the database to its new format and rewriting the site's code took longer than we hoped it would and, rather than wait until we had all of the ideas we're looking at were ready to go, we decided to deliver the first version of Places2Swim.com with only minor changes. The biggest change is in how the maps work, followed by some smaller changes in the detail listing page intended to increase transparency and simplify the layout.
Through Places2Swim.com, a Florida corporation, Brian now owns the site.
Although I no longer own the site, I have been intimately involved in the process that has brought us to this point and I have every intention to continue working on adding and updating the site's listings for as long as I can.
Hello, Swimming Friends, I'm Brian Webb, I'm the owner of Places2Swim.com and I've got some great ideas about what we can do for you.
Here are a few things we're thinking about doing with the site:
Those are just a few of the ideas we're toying with. Use the Contact Us page to let us know what you think.
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