I was on Tagg Radio today talking about fighters.com with professional fighter Frank Trigg, Gorgeous George and the Infamous Goze. During the show we also officially soft launched the site (is it a soft launch if you announce it? ). Its very beta and we have a long way to go but we have been running into the whole chicken or the egg thing lately and just decided to go with it and hammer stuff out as it comes. Dillsmack has done an amazing job coding pretty much everything but the news system from scratch.
Within minutes of opening it up to the public we had hundreds of registered users so we are off to a great start. This is pretty much going to be my heart and soul for the next year much like AuctionAds was in 2007, fighters.com is my thing in 2008.
There was some really good questions asked during the radio show and I was pretty nervous… here I am talking to a professional fighter one of the best ever at the welterweight devision (hughes vs. trigg2 is my fav fight of all time) and I am talking about our new MMA website to him. His first question was like… so what does this site do that the other 8000 MMA websites don’t do. My answer was pretty simple. We have a very good track record for coming into any competitive market. Be it ring tones or whatever and really listening to what users want then completely going over the top delivering. In time fighters.com will be the ultimate MMA resource. I have no doubt.
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Looks the same if not worse then the thousands of other cookie-cutter MMA sites springing up right now.
Id say its pretty clear your a newbie fan, trying to cash in on the craze.
Yes, better then sherdog.
i don’t want to underestimate your project, all i want to say is; this site is lower than your “shoemoney” brand. Do what it needs and make it better. You can do and we know that
have a nice day.
Shoemoney, i see you are excited about your site but let’s talk sincerely, this site is not more than a blog. Pages, Categories and Posts with a proffessional template. Is this your ideal fight site and you paid 10t s of dollars for a web blog? If you are pretentious, you need to have a good case.
I have been following Fighters.com and I do enjoy the content! I look forward to its growth.
I’m sure it’ll get better. It’s only a soft launch after all, and they probably have a lot more work to do.
Nice site. Like the logo. Will certainly make it my #1 resource for MMA.
A fantasy league sounds like it would be pretty cool. I like to take part in other sports fantasy pools when I have a chance, so I wouldn’t mind another.
~Terry
It’ll be interesting to see how dar he will go in MMA. He is a very scary dude for sure! He looks like he could snap my arm like a twig.
~Terry
Nice Shite, Hopefully we could exchange banners , your MMA website and my Boxing website.
e-mail me
Edgar
i love the fighters.com logo when can i buy a shirt with the logo on it? if you had an affiliate program selling your fighters.com gear i would join for sure and add it to my ufc blog. seriously though let me know if the shirts are available?
i love that your a fight fan too shoe i’m sure a lot of people come to this site for some amazing tip that is going to make them rich over night on the internet. Now i have one more reason to come back to this site. i subscribed to fighters.com can’t wait to see what comes of it. I’m going to blog about it on my ufc blog and add it to my blogroll. you might want to bet on my ufc predictions so you don’t lose so much money. ufc 82 i was 80%
With Bodog being the first sponsor will that mean more focus on Bodog Fight? or will all MMA get the same coverage?
~Terry
i think more than news reporting, however, you need to get some guys who are really good at analyzing the mma game, mmaweekly is a true pioneer in the mma websites, because it was started by ryan bennett(rip) who was definately one of the best mma reporter/analyzer there was.
mma got re-started as a grass roots forum/website thing back when it was near dead, and its the core group of people back then who understand the nuances of the history of the sport and the ramifications of future matchups, etc etc. that made sherdog and mmaweekly as popular as they are i think. and then there are the many fringe newer mma sites such as proelite and mmajunkie blog. etc etc
and then sherdog has the fightfinder
sherdog’s fightfinger is one of the best resources i think on the web to fight out a fighters history
never heard of mmaweekly… I think just saying we want to be sherdog sets our goals pretty low.
Yes we will have reporters and live coverage/interviews.
i agree designs not A-mazing but it will do for now !
Any way, we can listen this talk ?
Nice site.. I was professionally done, although it can be tweaked a little bit more
-W3G
It looks good and I’m sure you’re going to make it better as time goes on. Perhaps you can have a twist for your free shirt friday and promote Fighters.com and give away some free t-shirts with the logo – I really like that logo
~Terry
Anyway site design is much better than sherdog.com
This site is much more usable than sherdog.com
It might just be me but the left and right grey bands create a really bad strobing affect when I scroll up and down.
It doesn’t quite look like what I was expecting, seems fairly basic as a website. Early days I suppose, but I just thought I would see more than just a blog with heavy advertising around it.
Good luck
So will fighters.com compete with sherdog.com and mmaweekly.com ????
I mean sherdog and mmaweekly have teams of reporters going to every show big and small regardless of event, its what drives those sites, the news reporting and constant radio shows.
is that what fighters is going to try to do? become a sherdog?
Brock Lesnar is going to rule MMA. The dude is scary.
Design is ok–maybe colors are a little “rough” but so is UFC. You definitely need more fighters up there. Dillsmack has done some nice work on the coding so far. More features will be good for stickiness–interviews, fantasy league, maybe a gear store. I’m sure you can come up with a lot.
Hope you Elite(st) Retreaters are having a good time in our fine city by the Bay.
i agree that the site design can be improved.
the design could be better though!
Site’s content manager should save the proportions of the pictures instead of just resize them without worry, so in current condition news aren’t looking well.
Should be pretty interesting to follow this site. Shoe i think should be posting site stats evry month and show us how its doing ?!
Might want to re-consider the design ewww
Did you see the fights tonight. I like Kenny but thought that the fight itself was a little weak.
Don’t forget that’s fighters.com with an ’s’. I mistakenly went to the other a little while ago and it definitely didn’t have the Shoemoney touch.
nice to see a site from the launch. good luck
At the moment it justs looks like a modified worpress theme! I’m interested to see what you have in store….
Site looks good, but the pics in each post look like their aspect ratio is all messed up. Don’t look good.
I’m interested to see if this becomes something larger than AuctionAds was…
warning… theres a spoiler on the main page of fighters.com for tonights fight.
It doesn’t air til 7PT here and I just got a peak at 1 result.
I can’t wait to see how this turns out. For a hot minute everyone on Digital Point forums was selling a MMA site.
no real plans right now for a paid section but forums and fantasy league are in the future.
yup bodog will be our first official sponsor as soon as they give us the new creatives.
Aren’t the “users” going to provide all of the content? Atleast that was my impression.
Gotta love bodog. Once the images are scaled properly and a few things are tweaked, it could be a decent looking site. Seems you only need MMA to keep growing and users…
I just visited the site. Fantastic job. Really professionally done.
are you going to have a forum? and then have a paid membership for certain sections and rake in more money.
I was taking a look at site and really liked the layout. Do you not really deal with ultimate fighter? I noticed on the calender that you didn’t have the up coming fight listed.
I hope so I look forward to seeing how it all turns out. I am on my way right now to see what it is all about.
functionality – A
design – C
usability- A
Good work Shoe excited to see where this goes.
Killer site. I got some good up todate info on the fighters. I could spend a lot of time on the site. Just one thing. It is kinda not right to have girls on the fighters site too. Maybe another site. I know just what you do not want. LOL but have a site with just Girls called CatFighters.om
Man, I wish I could listen you but I live in Turkey…
Caught this on Twitter
Congrats on Figher.com, I am going there not to check the site out.