How do I start a successful badminton site such as this one or Badders.com? Lots of other sites look good or have potential but then die away but I don't want mine to do that. Any hints? LB.
Difficult tasks Well, do you know why those websites die away? Basically because they don't have contents and no meaningful information to provide. It's not easy to sustain a website where fan willingly to visit regularly like BadmintonCentra.com. I think aside from what BadmintonCentral.com can offer, an attractive website should have up-to-date info about badminton news, tournament results and video access for download. These are the difficult tasks to overcome but are the keys to success. My admiration of those who run BadmintonCentral, well managed and healthy discussion unlike the Worldbadminton discussion forum ruined by few bad apples.
Just because we can do it, is it justifiable to start a NEW badminton related website? And have redundant information floating on the web? Kwun, bear with me. I am not trying to swamp the BC/BF hosting server with traffic. If you like this website, and you think it provides information you always needed about badminton and which has the largest user base, why not use this website. If language is the issue, we have translators available online. What do you guys think? Do we need another badminton website now that we have BC/BF? We could help BC/BF set up additional servers or more bandwidth or both to balance the load at only a part of the cost it would take to start a new forum.
the only problem lacking from badmintoncentral is most of the tournament info + ranking + news + gossip are not updated regularly.
If you want a popular site, provided something that others want but can't get. BF/BC is mostly like a lounge. You should create something like a techniques site where you have videos and pictures describing strokes and footwork etc etc. Or a gossip site as suggested. Or a video storage site.
Re: Difficult tasks yes. Han is correct. the most attractive information on a website are the ones that are most difficult to get. video costs a lot of resource and money, both in obtaining and converting the videos and also the cost to stream it to somebody, and not to say if you run a commercial website, it is illegal unless you pay some ridiculous fees to the copyright owner. badminton news, well, that's very hard unless you travel to all the tournaments. you are also going against IBF, who has the resource and provides the service already. Raphael provides very professional coverage of many of the tournaments, that will be hard to beat. a few sites have made pretty good attempt on it, badmintonasia was providing some good articles but somehow they folded. other sites have news like badders but they seems to be just copied from IBF or some other news source. and of course, there is BC/BF. BC is a bit staled. most because lfie has not been as free as the days when i had time to update it. if you are on your own and want to make a successful site, you will need to make a lot of sacrifices. it takes a lot of effort, not to say it will cost you a lot of time and money as well. so unless if you have the financial means and a plan drawn out that tackes all the problems that we have and may not have mentioned, it will be tough and likely we will see another stale site.
i run a badminton site, but i found tha the only way to keep it from staling is to only make it attractive to a select few. My site is for the District badminton association where i live, i get the match results and weekly news sent to me and update it once a week, i have a good regular following. This seems to be a fine balance of new information and low workload. it does give me great pleasure when people tell me how good my site it. I imagine Kwun and the rest have to put a great deal of work in to manage such a huge site. well done and good luck to anybody who tries to set up a similar site Neil
Some very valid points here. Firstly, anyone wanting to start a site up...good luck to them. There are currently too few badminton sites online and the sport needs all the promotion it can get. The key to a new site is content. As Neil mentioned, his site is targeted towards a local community where very few others would be willing to sacrifice their own time to inform local people of what is happening with badminton in their area. Badmintonforum.com is the best discussion forum for badminton enthusiasts on the web. Clear and simple. For general forum chat it can't be beaten. Badders.com is a community site. We host discussion forums, event calendars, messaging and news management systems for over 1,800 clubs and over 400 leagues. We don't necessarily want to have a large 'general' forum (that is the role of badmintronforum.com) instead we focus on badminton in the community. That was our initial objective which still remains to this day. It is important that every site has an objective and sticks to it...Badders' focus is on grass roots badminton. Other sites have other targets. Worldbadminton.com is a great directory to many badminton sites on the web and includes 'free' video links. Many badminton enthusiasts request say video is the number one service they would like in a website. Unfortunately ,the web infrastructure is not friendly towards this as many viewers still have dial-up ISP accounts and it costs the provider a small fortune in bandwidth fees once the site becomes popular. Then there are the intellectual property rights. Streaming video without permission is theft. Someone owns the rights and paid for the video to be produced in the first place. As Kwun says, the copyright owner normally demands ridiculous fees...and these are these copyright owners are allegedly trying to promote the sport. On the point of news...Badders.com provides both primary and secondary information. Many articles and news pieces are sourced from news agencies and organisations such as the IBF. We also cover tournaments and have a good number of junior reporters that submit articles. The problem with badminton sites There is no money in it!!!!!!! As much as people think there are always donators and sponsors, there are not. Kwun relies on a modicum of donations that probably only scratch the surface. Badders.com is completely voluntary, no one gets paid and we have no revenue. We still have costs though...bandwidth, hosting, visiting tournaments, site/design costs and most importantly...TIME. Without the volunteers time no site will work. At Badders we have a small number of helpers who give their own time to moderate over 2,000 forums whilst trying to find worthy news articles at both local league and international badminton levels. It is the management of the sites which is also important. Enough scope needs to be given to the users, after all it is their site. But is needs good moderation and integrity. The IBF have let their discussion forum go to waste and another well publicised site has got itself unnecessarily embroiled in legal action because it wanted to maintain a political slant. Sites must be independent to enjoy a long-life, freedom of speech is encouraged but it must be channelled correctly. So back to Lord B's question. The more sites the merrier, but it must have specific objectives and not be a 'me too' site as well as having good management. The best sites have owners/mangers that dedicate most of their spare time to the cause with very little reward (except for the satisfaction of offering a great service). Dedication is key. Jonathan Phillips www.Badders.com
Thanks for all of your help, it is good to see so many helpful comments. It seems that I need some sort of "unique" content with the two main suggestions being technique and video. Video looks like being very expensive but what about coaching. Maybe I could get together some coaches to give advice to players over email or chat? What do people think?
Not a bad idea but do you think the coaches will get bored after a while? It is incredibly difficult to put down technqiues in words. Try describing the spin netshot, cross court net shot in words.
