damm your quick ... i was just comin back on to comment on this and you have the news right here :D

Great news, full commitment from a born and bred villa fan! Hope he has a great season again!

are these new contracts what your little cryptic clue was about in the last columm ???
or are you still holding out on us about something ???

cladge - it wasn't cryptic. sorry .. read my comment on the page .. the wife says that too :'(

Good news - Lets get Young tied up for as long as possible - Best player I've seen at Villa for years !!!

oh k m8 ..
guess the excitement of the new season looming and all the speculation has me lookin for things that are not there :D

so how many new contracts is that now for gabby ??
hes gotta be on his 4th or 5th now surely ..

Good on ya Gab - but learn how to look up and pick out a pass. Learn how to compose yourself on the ball. During last season you learnt how to hold the ball up but that has not been evident during pre-season and the european games. I've no doubt the lad will continue to improve under MONs watchful eye - but if you keep it simple and just steady yourself during games from time to time many of us wont get frustrated as we do when you run into blind alleys or try and take on a player when passing to a team mate is a better option...

Bazzah

That is possibly the last aspect of his game he has to get control of and if/when he does, I think he could be awesome ...

I'm not entirely sure whether I agree Damien? Isn't composure and passing the basic elements of the game? We know his strengths and he does have some terrific attributes - but being not the most technically gifted player he's a confidence player. Until he does learn the technical aspects I don't think he'll start a game for Capello's England. However, his all round game has improved and long may that continue!

I think, the three things you mentioned in your first post will do it for me.

He needs more composure on the ball when he's not 1 on 1 with the keeper, he needs to look up and he needs to play the right pass when he's not 1 on 1.

For me, if he can do that and basically stop running down the blind alleys you mention - he'll be a hugely better player.

I agree with you basically.

Damian, I'd be careful complaining too much about the OS.... cos what if someone actually listens, they update the site to be a relaly decent one and we all flocked over there? Enjoy your lime light ;)

villain of the north

i'd love it if they updated it. when they were doing it last time and we were told it's not just going to be a wickering of the old site, i got quite excited and even put an email together suggesting what they should do .. i'd be really happy if they did something special with it - i'd actually be quite proud too, if they didn't just look around and fit in - if they did something quite spectacular - they could make it the best football club site in the world - instead they're happy with the norm

so much potential thrown away. and it wouldn't cost much either - it would probably pay for itself within a year or two

Damian have you seen Portsmouths site?, by far the best Prem club site in my eyes:

LINK

Think we need to have an official site of this standard, both in design and content. I don't mean copying Portsmouths site but have a site of equal if not better quality.

I'm a graphic/web designer and would be happy to help out with it!!!!! and if your reading this Randy I only charge £200 an hour!! :)

To be honest, I'm a young web developer myself, Damian... The OS is shocking. I can only imagine the kinda budget they spent on it, what kinda money I'd charge for doing a site and compare the qualities and I'd laugh all the way to the bank if I was one of their developers...

I was impressed with Chelsea's site, they've clearly spent some money on it. In fact, a lot of individual player's sites are better than ours is.

Nath888

Yes, I've seen it and think it's great design wise, but my view for the club site would be to make it more community driven.

How many Aston Villa fans are there that use the net then how many of those are there that really don't use the club site - the bounce rate on the club site must be huge because people visit, see the headline, click the story, figure out it's old news then leave.

The club site could be so much more and they have, to some extent, a captive audience and when you've got that and you're not taking advantage - more fool them.

Design is vital, but functionality and features would be higher on my list. I won't tell you what is one, two and three on my list as I usually charge for those things ;)

[b]villain of the north[/b]

the irony is that the new chelsea site is a premiumtv site also

i'd personally want to move away from that and take it all in house - but the club decided to stay with premiumtv so we're stuck with it

i was actually told by someone at perform (the people that now own premiumtv) that this design was all down to the club - it was what they wanted

like you say - shocking

Agreed it should be inhouse. Reckon we should put a team together and make em a proposal? ;)

One of the biggest things I hate about the site is the welcome page. I use firefox and adblock addon, so when i load the page, it automatically blocks out all the ads (and the ability to navigate through to the homepage) Instead, I have to go back to my bookmark, click it a 2nd time before the page loads. And I have a feeling their cookies for that expire with every session (so everday you go through the same bollox)

Other than that, you could live with the design if the content was good, but that too sounds like it's written by someone more interested in getting off the computer and on to the golf course.

Going to be a huge season for Gabby. Another year with 10 or 11 goals to his name and I'm going to seriously start questioning whether he's as good as people say he will be.

I wonder how long it will be before one of the big boys come in for YOUNG? He is already worth £20mil

lets get some more people signed up for Robs fantasy football. 7 so far i think.
its metro fantasy football - the PIN is 8007772 and league name in caps AVFC BLOG PREMIER

Young is worth 30m to us at least

We should be trying to get players in, we need at least 3 more signings renew contracts when the window closes!

young is well better than gabby.we should have offered one for young first then gabby!
UTV ;D

Next two contract priorities are Young and Barry. in that order.

Damien,did Barry play last night to reduce his valuation?Please dont say MON's gonna drop his price now?the media will have a field day.

Exploro - while him being cup-tied would reduce Liverpool's inclination to buy/pay, it makes no difference at all to Villa in terms of finding and buying a replacement so there's no logic to MON accepting a reduction, other than wanting to cash in before it goes down further in January due to being closer to contract end. I think MON and RL would rather have him for 3 months than take the money now though.

Ashley Youngs been left out the England squad, wish I could get my head around that! Not to sound biased but I think he is a far better player than Downing and he's more consistent than Bentley. O_o