Website Help

Good Evening Everyone!

Someone on LinkedIn just referred me to this website about 10 minutes ago...literally! Please bare as I am new to this!

My name is Sean. I am the owner of National Gaming Events (NGE). My company specializes in running online gaming events such as leagues or tournaments. We are currently focusing on one game in particular — the First Person Shooter (FPS) Call of Duty. My company is widely known in this gaming community.

I would love to expand into other FPS titles and diversify into other gaming genres but to do that I would need a central hub where I have the ability to cross promote on various social media platforms to reach a larger audience. This central hub would be a website.

Right now, I run all of my online events through the company Twitter account and I have been for the past 6 years since I started. I have gained the attention of pro teams and had a lot of the most known players play in my events. As you can imagine, I have grew the company Twitter A LOT since it has been the only platform I have used. The company's twitter is twitter.com/NGE_League if you want to check us out!

I am contacting people in this group because I feel as though I should have had a website a LONG time ago. It is something crucial to my organization for market expansion as well as the chance to target new demographics. It also allows me to network more effectively, create better marketing campaigns and cross promote my events on multiple social media platforms simultaneously.

I believe the website should be built in stages or as I prefer to call them, "phases." Start simple and then through each phase, incorporate validation. Through each phase I would ask the community for feedback and build the next phase based off the feedback given to me and the debugging of functions with the help of friends. This doesn't mean I have to use all the feedback given to me because some of it may not be feasible but I want a huge community feel to the website. I want the people in the community to feel like they are making an impact on NGE's decision making. This is what I believe increases retention and the acquisition of new customers as well as decreases attrition.

Obviously there is a "final form" of what I would like the website to look like but I don't like getting ahead of myself. The final form of the website would be the stage to which all of my biggest competitors are at with their websites and of course even this will eventually be refined more over time.

Below are some of my competitors websites so you can see how they are made. I would personally like to take some aspects of each of these websites, add my own twists and additions and create a website that is a one-stop destination for "all things" eSports related. I want to make it so people come to the website and they dont need to go anywhere else because we have every thing they need all in one place.

Here are some of my competitors websites:

checkmategaming . com

(probably the biggest and most known online tournament hoster. The current leader in the industry right now. It is owned by some former pros so it developed a following pretty quickly.)

Guilded . gg

More of a newer platform trying to compete with discord but differentiate from them by having more community features and making it a lot more user friendly. Discord is a programmer's heaven but for some (including me) it can be confusing and somewhat complicated.

GameBattles . com

Used to be HUGE in the scene. It still is but this is when Major League Gaming (MLG) was around full force doing the professional CoD events that eventually turned into the Cod World League (CWL) which just recently turned into the CODLeague (CDL) which is Call of Duty's attempt at a franchise business model starting in 2020.

UMGGaming . com

They were another professional event hoster for Call of Duty but not nearly as big as MLG. They had the most easy-to-navigate website and app where competitive CoD players could find matches online to play for bragging rights or to achieve a higher rank. UMG was the first to introduce "wagers" into the scene which is where this site became HUGE and it still is. As you all probably already know, this is when teams can play each other for money. They made an update to their website that made it absolutely terrible from a UI perspective (people had such a hard time navigating the site. I am not sure if this is UX or UI lol). It took them a year or two to bounce back from that and they just recently created a whole new website within the last year and a half that is similar to their old website infrastructure.

These are 3 of the BIGGEST online hosters right now and 1 of the biggest community platforms. Guilded is an app not a website but I would like to take features from their app and put them into a website form eventually.

Check these websites out and let me know if these are something you (plural) think you would be able to work up to over time. I understand websites are EXPENSIVE which is why I never attempted to get one because this is still considered a start up and I dont have money like that. I also have no clue where to start. This is why I would like to create the website in phases to offset the costs more if possible.

I really hope to speak with some of you soon about this. I also hope to gain some valuable feedback and potentially gain the interest of a developer or two that want to embark on this project with me! I am from Boston so the IDEAL goal is to get someone in the Boston area so we could meet up , if necessary, and discuss the progress of the coding or ideas and be more productive and progressive with our time. I want to emphasize that although it may be IDEAL to work with someone from Boston, I understand this is not a perfect world and I may find someone on the East Coast (2nd preference) or someone else whose passion exceeds their work location. After all, technology does allow people to have meetings internationally nowadays.

Regards,

Sean Chase