Semi OT: Beta testers for CFB related website
I'm looking to get some feedback / testing done on www.rankingstown.com
It's a college football website meant to make it easy for people to create their own computer rankings. There is a lot of stats that can be looked at without creating a ranking system as well (including a lot of per possession stats)
I turned off the email verification for signing up so if anyone is leery about providing their email you can just make one up.
Any help and feedback would be appreciated, thanks.
Not sure of the off season rules and couldn't think of a better group of testers. Feel free to take down if deemed too far off topic and no feelings will be hurt here.
If you haven't yet, /r/cfb on reddit would be an ideal place to find beta testers.
I haven't but I'll see if I can get it up there as well, thanks.
I'll certainly give it a look. I can never get enough of college football.
Master beta... well.... I'm not nearly that organized so I would call this the "I have something that seems to work but lets see if someone else can break it" beta
One bit of advice from someone who has launched a number of different websites: Wait until you have demonstrated some value to the user before requiring them to create an account. You'll be a lot better results by allowing users to get started using the site without an account and only requiring an account when they want to do something like save or to share their rankings.
I'm sort of into ranking systems, and even developed my own CFB rankings in Excel, but even I couldn't be bothered to fill out the sign up form without having a chance to check out what the site does first.
It also doesnt help that your signup form itself is waaay longer than it needs to be. Every additional field you require will create a drop off in your signup conversion. Right now, you've got seven fields in your signup form. You should reduce this to two if you can (three at the most). You don't need the users first name and last name, you dont need a password confirmation field, you definitely dont need a CAPTCHA. They are signing up for entertainment website, not applying for a brokerage account.
I realized that it sounds dumb that I couldnt be bothered to fill out a form, but yet came back here to type all of this out, but that's how people think.
thanks for the detailed critique, it is exactly what I was hoping for. I took your advise and revised the create account page to only include display_name, email and password. I also added a demo account
email - [email protected]
password - Demo
Ok, I checked out the demo. You're obviously just getting started, so i'll leave out too many comments about usability, navigation, etc.
I think the idea is pretty neat. Basically it allows anybody to develop their own criteria to rank football teams and essentially create their own Football Outsiders-type rankings. Getting all the data and building the back end must have taken a bit of work, so bravo for getting this far.
A couple of things that jump out at me:
1 - Its really hard to deal with all of the different stats in humoungous lists like you have now, e.g.:
huh?