As a passionate football fan, playing fantasy football was a no-brainer. I’ve been doing it for decades now. I love drafting players, crafting a team through strategy, managing that team, and competing in leagues. I love when I identify an under-the-radar-player and draft them early knowing I got a steal when everyone else is scratching their heads. Hell, I don’t even mind when they don’t pan out and I look like an idiot (which seems to happen more often than not). It’s because of this passion that I started the Hardcorps Dynasty League in 2015, and the Grand Prix league in 2023 (and some of you may remember the disaster of the vampire league). I love sharing my favorite pastime with you all, and some of you are just as fanatical as I am about it!! I love it!! Many of you have grown this project with me over the years, and danesfantasyfootball.com was just another step towards that growth. While I’m not dissatisfied with my personal website design, I want to take this group to the next level and my design isn't going to do that.
Recognizing the Need for Improvement
Every time I log in to the site, I'm so happy that it's MY site, but frustrated with the ho hum feel of the page. I like the graphics theme I came up with, but the layouts and functionality are just bleh. I notice you all rarely engage with the site, and when most of you do, it's because I drag you kicking and screaming to it. If this is to get as big as I’d like it to, I need the site to be better.
With all this in mind, I know I'll need to make the site more aesthetically pleasing to you, as well as functional enough to make all the administrative tasks of running the league easier. I want my vision of the website to be your vision of what the website should be. As a fellow manager, I know some of the shortfalls of the website: bad navigation, really bad load times, poor layout, and lack of a consistent theme/scheme for all the sub-pages.
Bringing Ideas to Life
Understanding this and knowing it isn’t where I want my fantasy football dreams to go, I’ve decided to employ a web-designer. I have a vision of how this site should operate and function, and I have loads of new ideas for fantasy football fun. What I don’t have is web design skill.
I want the website to exude the excitement we all feel on Thursday, when nary a game has been played for the week, and our players have yet to disappoint us by scoring 2 points on an 18 point projection or going to the bench in the first 5 minutes due to a sprained toe. To achieve that goal, I’m tasking the designer to accomplish a number of things to include:
Mobile Optimization
I have paid ZERO attention to the mobile market. I know you are all busy doing your life routine and rarely sit at a computer and use a monitor for a website. That means the best way to get you to engage is on your phone or tablet. I hope to make the mobile design every bit as engaging as the regular site and make it easy to see and do the things you want to do on the site.
Engaging Community Features
One of the best aspects of fantasy football is the community/comradery (or shit talk as it were) it builds. As a fantasy enthusiast, I love engaging with friends and opponents, analyzing player performances, celebrating wins, and the late season excitement when you’re on the bubble of getting paid or saying goodbye to yet another entry fee. To enhance this experience, I envision incorporating better community features into the new design.
I’m wanting to get you all connecting through forums, live chats, and personalized notifications as well as assigning badges for accomplishments (kind of like last years ‘recruiter’ badge). By adding interactive elements, I’m hoping the page is more like a social media platform than just a fantasy football website. I already maintain an offline “Hall of Fame” for the Dynasty League, and eventually I will incorporate something like that online for every league that is run through danesfantasyfootball.com. This results in creating long term bonds that extend beyond the football field and enriches the overall experience (which leads to bigger prize pools….erm I mean more participants). If you HAVE to go to Yahoo to manage your team, I want you coming to my site for EVERYTHING else.
Added Functionality
One of the BIGGEST reasons I’m doing this is to automate many of the processes required to run a league like this. This all started small: 10 players, 1 league. It’s easy to communicate with 10 players and administer for 1 league. Then it grew to 12 players. Then I created proprietary rules. Then I wanted to play in different kinds of leagues. Then I wanted more friends and family to join me and play… As things continue to grow, keeping track of who paid, how much they paid, which league they are in, what rules exist, when/where is everyone is drafting, etc. is becoming unmanageable. I’m blessed to have my pops who does ALL the stats tracking and score keeping for Grand Prix. But even with his help I need automation to keep on this upward trajectory. Taking payment, creating leagues, assigning managers to leagues, tracking the stats, etc. I want to have the site do as much of that work as possible to ensure there are no human mistakes…and, honestly, to save some of my personal time.
What I need from you
I know this may have felt like I was leading up to asking for money, but I’m not. The website quote was…not cheap, and I’m still not sure the quote is going to cover everything. However, I plan on eating that cost, because this is my passion project. Or call it my hobby. Loads of people spend good money on their hobbies!!! Though I’m not asking for money, I will say this: from here out I plan on reserving 10% of the entry fees for administration and maintenance on the site. I feel 10% is a modest portion, and it will help keep things like sign-up, paying, and league creation smooth and effortless (and as of now 10% won’t even cover the annual costs of having the website).
What I DO need from you is that little extra effort to actually USE the page as much as possible. If you aren’t going to the page, let me know why and what I need to do or provide so that going to the page is as desirable as checking your Insta, TikTok, or FB feed (which I know you all do multiple times a day). As we move forward on this journey, I invite you all to help me envision what our new web site can achieve. I’m always open for ideas, new types of leagues, new website ideas, anything you guys can think of.
