Some SEO suggestions. Turn your primary text into text. What are you: 'The ultimate fantasy sports assistant.' That should be your H1 text. All your subheaders should be H2s - or whatever, but not multiple H1 tags.
If you can, all that text up there should be text if possible. It will go a long way. As a recently addicted fantasy football player, I can tell you people are searching for words that you've turned into graphics. On a small marketing budget nothing beats free traffic. SEO shouldn't be a focus, but it is worth the small time investment to do the basic things - the terms NHL, NBA, MLB, NFL or words baseball, football, basketball, hockey never appear on your index!
mobile apps are on our roadmap indeed. I'm just not sure if people research fantasy sports on their cell phone that much... Plus Yahoo and ESPN already have decent iPhone apps.
It'd eliminate the account creation hurdle and allow you to get more users involved right off the bat through discriminating sharing of data on users' Walls/Profiles.
I hear this advice a lot and I've implemented FB Connect on dozens of sites. But I have yet to see hard data that FB Connect increases signups. I'm not convinced that this is the best use of effort for early startups.
Do an A/B test... and definitely let me/us know what the results are, if you decide to do that. Hard data on this issue would be good for the whole community to have!
good discussion to have... Actually when we started Pickemfirst, we used Google accounts for authentication. This became a problem because we needed specific settings on our cookies so that they are available to third party sites. Plus people complained it was too difficult to create a Google Account. Might be different with FB connect though...
This looks useful for hardcore fantasy sports fans. However, I have always felt like Fantasy Sports need a lower barrier to entry for fans, not tools to make hardcore fantasy players better. As a casual sports fan I can definitely see the appeal of Fantasy Sports, but whenever I enter a league with friends I still get dominated, which is no fun. I think there could be a huge market for simpler, social Fantasy Sports games.
I agree with you. New players have no chance when facing experienced fantasy players. This make them more likely to drop out during the season and make everyone in the league unhappy (including the experienced players).
BUT if the beginners had tools (like Pickemfirst;) they will be able to compete right away... I feel that Pickemfirst does lower entry barrier, at least that's waht we had in mind when designing it.
That is interesting and I think Pickemfirst could be useful for beginners. However, from the video I got the sense that the product was tailored more for the hardcore crowd (those who have multiple teams and read articles across the web). As a beginner, I don't invest that much time and usually do my player analysis on the provided site (ESPN, Yahoo, etc). Just my thoughts.
agreed. Ideally we would have more than one video. And each one would target a specific audience. One thing is sure is that the only way to become good at fantasy sports is to do a lot of research. Both on the provider site and on others sites, blogs... This is obviously very time consuming.
maybe the one place where you really shouldn't follow a strict grid is when you are using overlays. the darker box that contains the video is seen as being "on top" of the main title area. but the top of the video is aligned with the end of the title area. that makes the lower edge of the title area "carry across" into the overlay, which is confusing.
if you move the video down slightly then it will look more convincing / natural / real. you might also try moving the dark area right a little, so that the title area "sticks" out to the right. moving the entire dark area down slightly would also give the descenders in the title text a little more room (there's the same problem on the left below "better picks today" - are you trying to squeeze too much in "above the fold"?). you could gain some space by moving to a white background and losing the middle (white) layer / frame (yeah, like everyone else - but perhaps that's why...)
to me it looks very much like you / your designer has been following "grids" without thinking about when they make sense (although otherwise it does look pretty good / clean - just the small details that look odd).
great feedback, Andrew! Thanks, I will definetely make some changes to my home page. You are correct about the "home grown" feel. I am a developer and didn't have any budget to invest in outside help. This might change soon.
Really like the idea. Will be a great additional to cheat sheet sites like http://www.fftoolbox.com (I know the owners, which is why I use this particular link).
I cant tell you how many hours I've spend going through Waiver Wire lists to check and see if they are available in my leagues. Will definitely be using this when fantasy football starts back up again!
I like this a lot. I built a much less polished version of this for my use last year which only supported ESPN fantasy mashed up with footballguys.com ranking data. I didn't immediately see but are you planning on charging for this?
Congrats on the launch. I saw the presentation for this at the FSTA conference and thought it was a great demo. I'm glad to see that the add-on is as good as it looked on stage.
i see that you take our credentials for yahoo and you take us to the url to add a player. Can you actually, post the transaction for us as well? Or are you giving the users the chance to review the change before submitting?
I don't really want to perform add/drop transaction in the add-on. The main reason is that I don't want yahoo (or others) to complain that I am taking page views from them. Giving the user the chance to review the transaction is also a plus.
No complaints from anyone yet. but better safe than sorry. Yes the Yahoo APIs are coming soon, but it will be a long time until the other game providers follow...
Some SEO suggestions. Turn your primary text into text. What are you: 'The ultimate fantasy sports assistant.' That should be your H1 text. All your subheaders should be H2s - or whatever, but not multiple H1 tags.
If you can, all that text up there should be text if possible. It will go a long way. As a recently addicted fantasy football player, I can tell you people are searching for words that you've turned into graphics. On a small marketing budget nothing beats free traffic. SEO shouldn't be a focus, but it is worth the small time investment to do the basic things - the terms NHL, NBA, MLB, NFL or words baseball, football, basketball, hockey never appear on your index!