Behind-The-Scenes of a Board Games Website

Okay, so for those not in the know about what goes into building a board games website like FastMovingGames, I’ve written this post to give you some background.

It’s easy enough having the vision, but thinking how to achieve that vision is another thing all together!

Luckily, I’ve already gotten this preview site and blog completed, which is stage 1. The blog allows me quickly and easily to let you all know what’s happening by simply filling out a form and writing the post.

The main board games website development will consist of the following steps:

1. Visual Design

As you can see I’ve already made quite a bit of headway here into the overall brand and final style of the site, preferring to keep it clean, simple, and readable - web 2.0 style!

2. Structural Design

This is a fancy term meaning planning out all of the various components we need on the website, and how these will work. This is sort of ad-hoc to a degree, and although much of it is written down and designed as I go, I have much of it in my head and best-practice from other work I’ve done over the years.

I guess formally, this would all be deisgned and documented up front if a customer was paying for the site, but hey, I wanna get to the meat of the development as-soon-as possible

I have already gone through various versions of the website site map, which details all of the pages available on the site (which is not as easy as it sounds, given that most pages will be dynamically generated based on user input!). I’ve stripped out a lot of unnecessary functionality from the original site maps to try to keep things as simple and usable for the first release.

I’ve mostly documented the web site’s functionality (in scribble form), and have also designed the rough inner workings of the core games engine. Still need to decide whether to charge to use the site (controversial one!). Currently I’m envisaging a free element so that all board gamers can access the site, and then maybe a cheap paid subscription on top for power users - its a difficult one, since there will be actual running costs to cover like web hosting

To give you an example of the sort of components I’ll need to design and build - these include things like the website framework (managing site errors and reporting, data logs, database access, user interface components, and process flow); the actual game engine itself - the core of what the site’s about; components that handle the email generated from the pages; social networking connectors; community forums; etc. The list goes on!

3. Development

Yeh, the best bit - once I’ve gotten an idea of all of the pages, components, supported board games, and various other functionalities, time to get my hands dirty and start coding. I made a start on this at the weekend, building up some of the core framework components to manage database access, application configuration, and error handling.

There’s lots of web-server programming languages that I could use to build a board games website like FastMovingGames, so I’ve taken a little detour by using this experience to learn PHP5 proper. PHP is a great free web-programming language that runs many of the world’s biggest and most robust websites - just the job! I’ve been using PHP4 and MySQL for a number of years now so this is naturally the most preferred language since I know it inside and out.

This development stage builds the technology, platform, and front end functionality that will make the site work. I’ll probably develop things in two passes - first a functional pass whereby I’ll get all of the pages working as per their design, but leave out any of the graphic design. At this point, it’s not meant to look pretty, instead have all of the data, and forms online submitting correctly and actually working!

This will also be the point where I start the first stage testing in earnest, ensuring the games engine functions correctly and saves/retrives data correctly into the database.

The second development pass will include the actual styling and layout of those pages, almost like choosing a ’skin’ for your desktop media player (of course I’ll have to design and build the skin first!)

It is this final design stage where I’ll add the bells and whistles and things that make the site usable and look cool!

4. Testing

Once the final look and functionality is complete, I’ll enter a closed pre-release testing cycle, whereby I’ll invite a few of the pre-registered users to help out to start using the site for real (before everyone else!) so that they can give me some feedback about how things work, and report any errors or problems they find.

Depending how this phase goes, I’ll either clear out this test data ready for the official launch, or go as-is.

5. Public Release

Yeh, rock on the final public release! After all this design, development, and testing, time to let the board gaming community in to start using the site - I know that’s what you’re all waiting for!

6. Promotion

Spread the word, submit to online news sites, get people using it, finding out what a great idea it is (hopefully ) and telling their friends. There’s a number of features in the site’s design that allow people to get their friends involved and spread the word, so I’m hoping for a great snowball effect.

As I’ve found out already, the promotion is the hardest bit, and I don’t have any marketing budget behind me like a big corporate might have - so just need to put in more hard work, and hopefully receive some grateful referrals from satisfied board gamers!

Where Next?

Well, depending on uptake and usage I’ve already got some phase 2 features planned out (like an online shop for some cool board gamer t-shirts and merchandise - can’t wait for this!) I imagine much of my time after this will be taken up getting involved in the FastMovingGames community, and answering forum postings and the like, but given my day-job, I’ll see how things develop - again might need to get some of you involved to help moderate the forums here!

A few Milestones for the site that I foresee ahead:

• Development: Framework Complete
• Development: Games Module Complete
• Development: User Login/Management Module Complete
• Development: Core Games Engine Complete
• Development: Social Networking Module Complete
• Development: Community Module Complete
• Development: Email Module Complete
• Development: First Pass Functionality Complete

–

• Testing: First Pass Tests Complete
• Development: Front-End User Interface Complete

–

• Testing: Second Pass Tests Complete
• Testing: Pre-Release Testing Complete

–

• Release: Public Launch
• Site Promotion

–

So there you have it - lots to do as you can see! Depending how much spare time I get away from work and away from actually playing board games (boo!), I’m hoping all of the above will take about 3-4 months, so hopefully not too long to wait.

Feel free to post comments below!

Thanks for reading,
-Dan

Posted by Dan on Mon Feb 25th, 2008 at 5:23 pm and is filed under Process. 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 25th Feb 2008 |
• Digg |
• Del.icio.us |
• Stumble