NYYTalk.com - New York Yankees Community Forum

[John L.]

Background
I've been a huge baseball fan for as long as I can remember and over the past few years I have been contemplating creating a community forum, but have not due to feature of over saturation in the market. Then I realized, I'm not really creating this to compete with the market, I'm doing it to give myself a voice in the sport I love and the team I adore. That team is the New York Yankees. As of right now I don't have much to offer people but quality discussion and a nice looking site (hopefully). I'm not looking to take over, but to give people a different perspective and spark discussions among baseball fans, but in particular Yankees fans.

Website: http://nyytalk.com

Addons Used
In terms of addons I'm using, I am trying to keep this pretty light in that area. I have a handful of key addons I'm using and want to give their creators some props:

• Double Post Merge by @Syndol
• Enabled Debug from Admin CP by @Chris D
• Simple Forms by @LiquidPro
• Live Update by @Chris D
• s9e Media Pack by @JoshyPHP
• bD Cache by @xfrocks
• bd Tag Me by @xfrocks
• bd Widget Framework by @xfrocks
• bd Social Share by @xfrocks (Soon)

So a big thank you guys for the work you do that allows me to make a quality community forum. Most of these fall more in line with admin tools, but products like s9e Media Pack and bd Social Share allow me to enhance the experience for our users and also post content to our Twitter account which will be a big driver of eyeballs.

Traffic Drivers
To be honest I do not expect much in terms of traffic for quite a few months. Although this is the best time to have a site dedicated to baseball since it's the offseason and the big trades and deals will be happening over the next month and half. Twitter is a huge part of baseball media and most stories break on Twitter before they break anywhere else. The key is finding the right sources to follow and to not jump the gun on premature/fake news. I have created a Twitter account for the site and I hope to have my posts sent directly to Twitter which will drive traffic to the site. At the moment I have almost no followers, but I'm hoping to build that. Going to be a lot of work for very little in return, but it's something I love!

Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/nyytalkDOTcom

So, what do you guys think? What do you think I could be doing differently or what would you like to see?

 

[Carlos]

Nice design! I love especially how the sign up box really captures the baseball feel... like a welcome mat..!

One question tho: Why a yankees site? You realize there's a ...sort of ...negative connotation with "Yankees"? (Yes, I read that you're a NY Yankees fan. I was asking what motivation was behind it despite the negativity towards yankees?)

 

[petertdavis]

Nice looking site. Is that Brogan's Featured Threads addon on the front end? IMO, the only thing you have to work on now is getting active members, the site looks really nice how it is.

 

[John L.]

Nice design!

One question tho: Why a yankees site? You realize there's a ...sort of ...negative connotation with "Yankees"? (Yes, I read that you're a NY Yankees fan. I was asking what motivation was behind it despite the negativity towards yankees?)

As far as the negative connotation behind the word "yankee", I can't really speak to that. The New York Yankees is a Major League Baseball franchise team and probably one of the most widely known team internationally. I just happen to be a fan and the motivation has been to give myself a voice to what the Yankees are doing and find people who enjoy intelligent baseball conversations.

Nice looking site. Is that Brogan's Featured Threads addon on the front end? IMO, the only thing you have to work on now is getting active members, the site looks really nice how it is.

Thank you! No, I'm not using @Brogan 's addon. I'm sure it's wonderful, but I feel like I need more content before it's useful for the site. I am using the Widget Framework for the homepage with a few CSS customization's here and there.

 

[John L.]

Wow, I completely forgot to talk about the...

Design
The design was made possible by the fantastic work on @Mike Creuzer (formerly known as Audentio). He created some great themes and I simply just customized the heck out of it to make it look how I want . Without him doing a lot of the leg work though, this wouldn't be possible and his hard work should definitely be mentioned!

The logo was purchased from DesignCrowd which has been a great resource for finding quality logos at a decent price. The winning logo, I think, is really awesome!

 

[Bram]

Looks fantastic @LP-John!

 

[Dad.]

Absolutely amazing John. You've got real talent man I keep saying it. You help make my job so much more enjoyable by seeing what you create from it. This is all you buddy.

 

[Crimson]

It looks like a gem! Love the design .

Although if I were to pick on anything, it would be the color of the breadcrumb. Seems too grey for my taste.

 

[John L.]

Absolutely amazing John. You've got real talent man I keep saying it. You help make my job so much more enjoyable by seeing what you create from it. This is all you buddy.

Thanks Mike, I appreciate those kind words. It's always fun playing around with any UI.X based theme!

It looks like a gem! Love the design .

Although if I were to pick on anything, it would be the color of the breadcrumb. Seems too grey for my taste.

Thanks Crimson! Hmm...not sure what I can do to those so I might leave them .

 

[tajhay]

Nice work. Good to see another xenforo sports forum

Looks very clean. If I could give any feedback, it is perhaps to make your background node images blurred/black and white and then on hover have the actual image displayed. Right now it takes away too much focus whilst looking at the different sections.

 

[John L.]

Nice work. Good to see another xenforo sports forum

Looks very clean. If I could give any feedback, it is perhaps to make your background node images blurred/black and white and then on hover have the actual image displayed. Right now it takes away too much focus whilst looking at the different sections.

Thanks for the ideas. I'll see if I can do that.

 

[Rich]

I like what you did! Even know Im a mets fan!

 

[flitigalisa]

Wow, I completely forgot to talk about the...

Design
The design was made possible by the fantastic work on @Mike Creuzer (formerly known as Audentio). He created some great themes and I simply just customized the heck out of it to make it look how I want . Without him doing a lot of the leg work though, this wouldn't be possible and his hard work should definitely be mentioned!

The logo was purchased from DesignCrowd which has been a great resource for finding quality logos at a decent price. The winning logo, I think, is really awesome!

@LP-John which one of the Audentio themes did you use as a base?

 

[John L.]

@LP-John which one of the Audentio teams did you use as a base?

Intrepid: https://xenforo.com/community/resources/intrepid.3430/

 

[flitigalisa]

OH you make me so happy. Cause Intrepid is one of my two favorites and now it for sure feels like I have a winner. How difficult is it to tweek in an image as you did behind the
"Are you a real New York Yankees fan? Join Us, it's FREE!" and maybe you or @Mike Creuzer can tell me if I need to have any text at all in that area or just could use my header/logo?

 

[John L.]

OH you make me so happy. Cause Intrepid is one of my two favorites and now it for sure feels like I have a winner. How difficult is it to tweek in an image as you did behind the
"Are you a real New York Yankees fan? Join Us, it's FREE!" and maybe you or @Mike Creuzer can tell me if I need to have any text at all in that area or just could use my header/logo?

It's fairly simple. The UI.X theme adds many new styles properties and one is called "Welcome Block". Find that style property and add a background image to it. I recommend using a large image, but scale it down it Photoshop to about "High" quality. That will save you on file size, yet still produce a nice image to see.

Here are my settings:


Notice the use of "background-size: cover" in the additional CSS section? That will make it so that your large image completely covers the containing element. Hopefully that helps.

 

[flitigalisa]

THANKS Think it's time for me to finally go shopping for a theme to finish of my installation and go live

 

[xfrocks]

Very nice site @LP-John, I love how the headers are big and the spacing is all balanced

 

[tajhay]

You might want to get rid of the 'forums' breadcrumb appearing on the homepage. Perhaps a favicon would help too. Nice site man. Pity you only got 2 members on there.

 

[Lawrence]

... Pity you only got 2 members on there.

Everyone who loves baseball has a love/hate relationship with the Yankees, he'll get members,

@LP-John Great looking site, well laid-out. Do you have a forum for discussing games as they are played? I didn't see one. If you do not I think you should have one set-up, and of course make it easy to tweet the live discussions as they happen.

As a big Toronto Blue Jays fan, I did notice one small oversight... you have a forum called the Dugout for discussing non-Yankee news, you should have a sub-forum dedicated just to the East, there is no bigger/tougher division in MLB than the American League East, and that forum would generate a lot of discussions, IMO.