My name is Kirk J. Torrance BSc, Graduate of the University of Abertay Dundee. During my first year I came up with a Student Portal Concept for one of my classes. When I approached the Students' Association's President (Jamie Allen) and encouraged him to establish a website for UADSA - This concept became AbertayUnion.com . I developed the concept and built the sites for the Association during the offices of several Presidents... At the end of 2004 - due to political and financial reasons the AbertayUnion.com Project was shut down. In late 2005 UADSA requested that the University provide funding to allow the re-establishment of AbertayUnion.com. The President at the time asked me to sell the AbertayUnion.com domain name rights to the University in anticipation that I'd be able to reproduce the Project once again as a paid employee of UADSA. However, after the sale had gone through - the University decided to produce their own version of AU.com within the University's IT Department and without my involvement, in an effort to save money I suppose...

I've setup this page to showcase the history of the AbertayUnion.com Project so that there is a permament record of the history of the project; and perhaps to encourage the current developers of the site to make the current version better. The current version of the site can be seen by :: Clicking here ::

Version 3 was a total rebuild of the AU.com Project. Built with pMachine - a powerful and robust CMS that offered growth, stability, security, cohesiveness and control to the Project. The first stage of the v3 launch was the newly formed UADSA Sports Union website - a sub site of the main AbertayUnion.com site. Working with Ben Best the SU President, I developed a Marketing and Operational Strategy for the Sports Union - with the website at its core. The website allowed the Sports Union to provide services to the Clubs & Societies that it represented including dedicated sections, CMS based Work Flow for content editors, and Email & SMS based Communications to teams along with the Sports Union Portal which was a one stop shop for all Clubs & Sports at Abertay.

The major marketing strategy was in branding the Sports Union - The Abertay Sharks. Through my research I'd noticed American Universities in the 70s and 80s take this step in an effort to invoke more passionate student participation in support of Varsity Teams as well as a direct effort in trying to capitalize financially off this support. In a climate in Scotland (and more broadly; the entire UK) where Universities are under increasing pressure to find new revenue streams as a direct result of government cutbacks and a restructuring of University Funding - I thought by employing a similar philosophy to Scottish Institutions it would follow that similar benefits would follow... Ben Best seen my vision and worked with me to try and bring it to fruition. Unfortunately, 2004 was the first and last year the Sports Union was under student control and before Ben and I could secure funding from the University and NUS Scotland - we were no longer in control. This was also my 3rd year of study at University and I could not continue to work pro-bono on what I really believe would have been a revolutionary project...

Version 3 - http://sports.abertayunion.com no longer exists as a concept as all Abertay Sports information is controlled by the university and can now be found at: http://sport.abertay.ac.uk. The Website I built - as it was database driven - no longer exists as a functioning site. However - the shell can be viewed to get an idea of the look and feel of the concept.