Behind-The-Scenes of a Board Games Website

There’s been some great feedback about the site so far - lots of buzz as I had hoped, and still people coming through signing up to be kept in touch.

Interestingly some feedback has been people ‘not getting it’; not understanding what the site is about or what it will be for - this isn’t surprising since I’ve not released the core idea yet!

Other feedback has been curiosity piqued and general interest. There’s been some intriguing discussion about what the site will do in some of the comments, and the last Dice Tower podcast #117 had a stab at it (thanks for this Tom) - they suggested maybe a social networking tool to let you find gamers in your area (which I think has been done before - its not on FMG’s core feature list anyway…) Really great watching this sort of interest grow.

A few observers have said that its too early to release the site and those that do come will not be satisfied since there’s nothing really here. To a degree these people are right - there’s not much here yet, but this is changing fairly rapidly.

My hopes with this preview site was really focussed around two things:

1. For board gamers who are curious, but want to skip to the final release to see what the hype was about - I hope you’ll sign-up using the form to the left, so I can do just this.

2. For board gamers who are interested in watching the site grow over time and want a sneak peek - I hope you’ll read the blog regularly or subscribe to the news feed.

As an aside, the idea for a preview site is not a new one, I first came across it at BareNakedApp a few years back, when they were journaling the development of their new idea (the then unknown and unreleased Amigo website). Their blog generated some real buzz and gave them a good idea of who might use the site, pre-building their community as they went.

For me, that’s what this preview site is about: to give ‘early adopters’ a behind-the-scenes look at what’s coming, to get people talking about it and guessing what it might be. Whether it’s good or bad, I love the idea that it might have given you something to talk about at your last games group at least! And, hey, when I finally launch, if for you the reality doesn’t live up to the hype, then no worries, thanks for your interest so far.

Being slight biased, I personally can’t wait!

Cheers,
-Dan

Posted by Dan on Fri Feb 29th, 2008 at 12:54 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 29th Feb 2008 |
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