too plain, simple, and uninteresting?

[SaveMeNow]

I like how the league is structured, there's ranks and forums where you can talk about anything but there is one thing I want to ask about and that is this website. Why is it so plain? Compared to other starcraft sites like teamliquid.net or gosugamers, this site is least attractive to the eye. Why doesn't the admin put some cool designs and borders? And there's no banners and nothing, just  plain blue, grey, and black.

[LivE.SworD]

I'm not a front-end developer, those things are generally outside my level of experience. If you can do better or know someone that can do better, I'll be glad to take their help

[SaveMeNow]

pretty sure you can find someone and pay them not much to design the site

[RJBTV]

pretty sure you can find someone and pay them not much to design the site

I kind of like the simplicity and the dark color scheme. It's very easy on the eyes and very easy to navigate.

[SaveMeNow]

than I think just add some border designs would be cool.

[beaTz-]

pretty sure you can find someone and pay them not much to design the site

Well then why don’t you pay somebody since you care so much about it. Not being a dick just saying

[sNipEr.ScopE]

pretty sure you can find someone and pay them not much to design the site

Well then why don’t you pay somebody since you care so much about it. Not being a dick just saying

sure about that not being a dick part mark?

[beaTz-]

pretty sure you can find someone and pay them not much to design the site

Well then why don’t you pay somebody since you care so much about it. Not being a dick just saying

sure about that not being a dick part mark?

Well I mean shit he just expects sword to keep forking out money on shit that doesn’t even matter.

[TealSilverSteal]

Gus, Mark does have a point. We cant keep spending money on a already functional site. Lets keep it this way and try to increase the activity. After that we can talk about details.

[Swagnificent]

Coming from a marketing & design background, I have seen through hundreds of case studies that better design is quite useful in acquiring new customers/users, especially when paired with a good marketing strategy. It could be a good way for us to attract better talent in the way of streaming/casting and tapping into previously unreachable communities like low$ folks on TL or Korean Styler map players. '

Each of these would be orders of magnitude improvement on activity, probably performing way better than the micro-optimizations we've been doing currently. That said, any progress is good progress, so good work to SCW staff and users making this place incrementally better each day!

[TealSilverSteal]

If im not mistaken the word has already spreaf about this league. Rabbit, Brain and Succon are just some few ppl that has over 10.000 followers at their Youtube... its SC, and the game is pretty old. A new site wont do any good. Stuff we should focus on.

- Tourneys.
- Lowmoney maps.
- Super maps.
- make rules as the koreans have.
- every member should pay a fee of 1 dollar, each season.

[Swagnificent]

If im not mistaken the word has already spreaf about this league. Rabbit, Brain and Succon are just some few ppl that has over 10.000 followers at their Youtube... its SC, and the game is pretty old. A new site wont do any good. Stuff we should focus on.

- Tourneys.
- Lowmoney maps.
- Super maps.
- make rules as the koreans have.
- every member should pay a fee of 1 dollar, each season.

With all due respect, I think you are misunderstanding the essence of what I said. Reaching an audience has to do with getting them to engage, not getting them to know you exist. There is a difference, one which you are not taking into account. It's not about word of mouth, it's about whether or not we have something with which consumers/users deem worthy to engage.

I can't speak much to those micro-improvements you're proposing. They seem like ideas worthy of entertaining. I will say that if an activity boost is the goal, then your last point of charging a fee is a huge detriment to this goal. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of case studies publicly available about pricing models that will illustrate this point with real-world use cases. I know that $1 seems like a small amount and that most people should (in your eyes) have this kind of money to spend on something they care to participate in, but that's just now how users behave.

As far as whether or not a better site will do any good, I feel our opinions differ wildly. You offered no points to serve your argument, but I'll try to offer some to serve mine.

• User experience research shows that users, especially gamers, want things for free. We see gaming companies, including Blizzard, understanding this and implementing "Freemium" models all over the place. This is based on the findings of their marketing teams, which have budgets upwards of 500k-1M per year.(
• Design directly impacts a user's trust. In today's era more than ever we have users questioning where they give sensitive data (even email, despite the ease of creating burner emails). I imagine trust is also the reason Sword implemented SSL on his site, and is the reason I didn't sign up until it was implemented.
• Design entices a user to act. Think about StarCraft's design. If they didn't have great art and a great user interface, what would have prompted you to play it? You wouldn't have chosen it over another game had it not done this. On the same line, we're technically competing with Blizzard's ranked league as well as just public games in terms of enticing users to play. If we can't offer a user experience comparable to one of those two (and there are even more) highly-polished places of competition, we won't see a massive growth in activity.
• Design encourages repeat behavior. If we implemented features in the league's interface which encouraged repeat use, we would see repeat use. There are hundreds of publicly available case studies and books on this too. One highly-touted book on this subject is called Hooked.
• Marketing isn't just about getting people to know you exist. It's about getting the right people to know you exist and giving them a good reason to act. You say Korean gamers have given SCW high visibility all across the community, but we haven't seen much return on that. Surely some of it is rules, maps, and community perception, and language barriers. But a lot of it has to do with SCW not really being set up to convert any new traffic that comes here into users.

We get stuck looking at this place through the lens of someone who has participated in FMP leagues for over a decade. It becomes hard to consider the perspective of a fresh gamer. For instance, if you go to our site right now and look at the homepage, what does it want from you? It looks like a forum and that it wants you to register for an account to participate in the forum. League is mentioned as a text link in the middle of one of the posts. This is a limitation of the technology Sword is using, I'm sure, but it is still a limitation.

If we were serious about garnering new members for our league, this place would look like a league from the get go. The objective truth of the matter is that it doesn't look like a league. If we were to create a clear path to convert new visitors into users, we would see a much higher rate of user acquisition than we currently see (a lot of which are probably duplicate accounts).

I'd be happy to discuss any of this further with Sword or whomever.

Source: I've done this for a living for 8 years and run a highly-profitable business doing this for clients with enterprise-level budgets and concerns.

[eL]ToRpEdo[]

If im not mistaken the word has already spreaf about this league. Rabbit, Brain and Succon are just some few ppl that has over 10.000 followers at their Youtube... its SC, and the game is pretty old. A new site wont do any good. Stuff we should focus on.

- Tourneys.
- Lowmoney maps.
- Super maps.
- make rules as the koreans have.
- every member should pay a fee of 1 dollar, each season.

With all due respect, I think you are misunderstanding the essence of what I said. Reaching an audience has to do with getting them to engage, not getting them to know you exist. There is a difference, one which you are not taking into account. It's not about word of mouth, it's about whether or not we have something with which consumers/users deem worthy to engage.

I can't speak much to those micro-improvements you're proposing. They seem like ideas worthy of entertaining. I will say that if an activity boost is the goal, then your last point of charging a fee is a huge detriment to this goal. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of case studies publicly available about pricing models that will illustrate this point with real-world use cases. I know that $1 seems like a small amount and that most people should (in your eyes) have this kind of money to spend on something they care to participate in, but that's just now how users behave.

As far as whether or not a better site will do any good, I feel our opinions differ wildly. You offered no points to serve your argument, but I'll try to offer some to serve mine.

• User experience research shows that users, especially gamers, want things for free. We see gaming companies, including Blizzard, understanding this and implementing "Freemium" models all over the place. This is based on the findings of their marketing teams, which have budgets upwards of 500k-1M per year.(
• Design directly impacts a user's trust. In today's era more than ever we have users questioning where they give sensitive data (even email, despite the ease of creating burner emails). I imagine trust is also the reason Sword implemented SSL on his site, and is the reason I didn't sign up until it was implemented.
• Design entices a user to act. Think about StarCraft's design. If they didn't have great art and a great user interface, what would have prompted you to play it? You wouldn't have chosen it over another game had it not done this. On the same line, we're technically competing with Blizzard's ranked league as well as just public games in terms of enticing users to play. If we can't offer a user experience comparable to one of those two (and there are even more) highly-polished places of competition, we won't see a massive growth in activity.
• Design encourages repeat behavior. If we implemented features in the league's interface which encouraged repeat use, we would see repeat use. There are hundreds of publicly available case studies and books on this too. One highly-touted book on this subject is called Hooked.
• Marketing isn't just about getting people to know you exist. It's about getting the right people to know you exist and giving them a good reason to act. You say Korean gamers have given SCW high visibility all across the community, but we haven't seen much return on that. Surely some of it is rules, maps, and community perception, and language barriers. But a lot of it has to do with SCW not really being set up to convert any new traffic that comes here into users.

We get stuck looking at this place through the lens of someone who has participated in FMP leagues for over a decade. It becomes hard to consider the perspective of a fresh gamer. For instance, if you go to our site right now and look at the homepage, what does it want from you? It looks like a forum and that it wants you to register for an account to participate in the forum. League is mentioned as a text link in the middle of one of the posts. This is a limitation of the technology Sword is using, I'm sure, but it is still a limitation.

If we were serious about garnering new members for our league, this place would look like a league from the get go. The objective truth of the matter is that it doesn't look like a league. If we were to create a clear path to convert new visitors into users, we would see a much higher rate of user acquisition than we currently see (a lot of which are probably duplicate accounts).

I'd be happy to discuss any of this further with Sword or whomever.

Source: I've done this for a living for 8 years and run a highly-profitable business doing this for clients with enterprise-level budgets and concerns.

Fake news

[K]o[L-Stalker]

You bring up some good points swag.  Definitely something to start talking about.

[SaveMeNow]

Honestly speaking I told some friends of mine about fastest league here and that u need to register in order participate in the league. U know what they say? This place(site) us a Sithole or it looks like a scamming site.