Make your Race Bulletin mobile-friendly. Totally free.

Have you found race information hard to find when you most need it? For example, when teams come to dispute an umpire decision, and the rule book is never nearby?

Try to look it up on your phone, but the rules was prepared in PDF. It is a torture to read PDFs on mobile phones.

PDF was not designed for mobile use

PDF was invented more than 30 years ago, to be the common file standard for laying out information on a page. A paper page. It works perfectly well when the recipient prints it out on a piece of paper, or when read on a big screen.

Users need to scroll around many times to read one paragraph in a PDF

However, PDF is not ideal for the mobile internet age:

1. A lot of people hesitate to download a PDF when they see the large file size. They might think, well, I will download it when I get back to my office. When they get back to the office, they forget about it.

2. PDF has a fixed width. You either fit it to a mobile screen, or a paper size width. You are doomed to make one group of users not happy.

3. PDF is difficult to share.

4. PDF is not search engine friendly. Meaning your work is less likely to appear in Google and other search results.

5. You have no way of knowing how many people have read your work.

A better alternative — totally free

I would like to introduce a better alternative. It is “Medium.com”, a publishing platform. I have no commercial interest in Medium.com. Just a happy user.

1. It is free.
2. It works nicely with all size of device width.
3. It supports most media type. Text, images, videos.
4. It provides read statistics in real-time. It is easy to know what content is more popular.
5. It is automatically optimized for search engines.

Collect all related articles in one place

I am sure, once you have tried, you will fall in love with Medium.com, and ditch Microsoft Word and Google Doc.

After you have written a few articles, you may want to try the “Publication” feature.

The “Publication” feature is especially good for grouping articles together. Below is an example:

https://medium.com/dragon-boat-race-innovations

With a Publication like this, you can feed your readers with short articles more frequently, thereby creating more engagement. It is also easier to share a small piece on social media.

About the Author

Leroy Yue loves sports. He created PikaPage, a mobile apps company with the mission to make amatuer sports more user-friendly and more efficiently run.

With a lot of hands-on experience from helping sports organization, he writes articles to share tips and tricks, hoping they may become useful to other sports organizers.