Behind-The-Scenes of a Board Games Website

It’s been a busy week trying to spread word about the preview launch of this new service for board gamers. Originally, I had intended this website would serve as something simple, to provide a brand and initial information of what’s coming up. What I didn’t realize is that what appeared to be a week or so worth of work to build initially, actually turned out to be much longer, taking a few months of effort putting together all the supporting pages, researching board games, creating information pages, and producing tools to help search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN index the site easier.

So after finally having gotten the site ready to launch seemed almost the easy bit - telling a few people and generating a bit of buzz. Well, again, another great under-estimation! I’ve spread the word out to some local gaming groups (shout out to Mt Albert Auckland Gamers!), spread the word online to a few board games news and review sites, and generally been looking for other sources of board gamers to get involved.

Wow, a busy schedule looking back over the last few days - but a worthwhile one. There’s a few mechanisms behind the scenes that I’ve been using to see how the site’s working; Google Analytics, FeedBurner’s stats, and the email stats from HailStorm, the system that sent your out the welcome emails (thanks for signing up). So here’s a BIG THANK YOU for everyone’s great support - every time I come back to the computer to hack out some more code for the games engine, there’s another 4 or 5 people signed up, or more messages waiting asking for further details. It’s great to get a bit of validation of the idea in this way, especially when I haven’t given away much of what the idea is actually about!!

Of those that have requested more information, I’ve been coaxed into letting the following information slip, so thought I’d share it with you loyal supporters:

FastMovingGames will be an online tool to help board gamers play more and better games with their friends, tying in to existing social networking and community websites, and complementing resources like BoardGameGeek and online games site BSW.

Okay, so not a huge amount more information, but it’s getting there slowly! I’ve put together a plan for upcoming blog posts and how these might need to develop to give you a heads up of what’s going on here at FastMovingGames central (i.e. my basement office) so stay tuned over the next few weeks for more.

Your next mission, if you decide to accept it, is to help support us by spreading the word further, and getting more of your board games buddies to read the blog. I’d love to get some comments on the blog and start developing some community, I’m sure I could think of ways of getting you early supporters some benefit when we finally release!

So, please feel free to add a comment below, say hello, let me know who’s reading, maybe tell me your board games of the moment.

Thanks for reading,
-Dan

Posted by Dan on Sun Feb 24th, 2008 at 8:31 pm and is filed under Vision. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

• Posted on 24th Feb 2008 |
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