SneakyDave
Well-known member
About
Creighton moved from the Missouri Valley Conference in 2012 to the Big East last year, and finished 2nd in the conference it its first year.
Creighton moved from the Missouri Valley Conference in 2012 to the Big East last year, and finished 2nd in the conference it its first year.
That being said, there were only 2 fan message boards promoting the team after the main one fell under mismanagement. One is a private membership Rivals/Yahoo based forum, and the other is using PHPbb. Both have their various flaws: limited or no search functionality, corporate owned, not secure, antiquated forum framework, management instability, etc. Both would be considered small to medium sites.
So, I realized there might be a need for a new Creighton Bluejay message board, and although I'm a fan, I don't have near as much knowledge of the team (or NCAABB) as I'd like to, so I've entered into a partnership with individuals that can provide some decent content about the team and conference.
This is a brand new forum, not a lot of content or members obviously, but the NCAA basketball season starts this week, and there is a lot of excitement over who will be the power players in the Big East conference.
Add-ons
We are using Brogan's Featured Threads for the home page, which is really nice touch for articles or threads that we want to draw attention to, as well as the CTA Countdown Timer.
We have @Daniel Hood's Hashtags installed, as well as @Jeremy's Mini Avatar With Tag feature, to accessorize the XenForo "social experience". @Bob B's Sportsbook and Stock Trader add-ons are some time wasters geared toward the sports bettor/day trader types. We may also be using an upcoming articles system that seems promising.
And of course, we're using @Luke Foreman's Post Ratings, and Taigachat add-ons, as well as @Chris D's Xen Pushover and Unread Post Count add-ons.
All of that is wrapped nicely around a slightly modified Quark theme from @Mike Creuzer.
Operating System
At the server level, we're running on a Linode VPS, utilizing the easy to configure Centmin Mod from @eva2000. The site runs MariaDB, nginx, SSL, SPDY, and Pagespeed (when it behaves). The ForumBackup add-on is used to perform daily backups, and we also utilize Linode's backup solutions.
The site employs the new(er) .zone domain name extension, but we've also acquired the names bluejayzone.com and thebluejay.zone.
Promotion
We are currently running a New User Contest for a drawing of a $25 Amazon Gift Card (ends December 25, 2014). We've been using Adwords for advertising, as well as a little Facebook promotion, targeted toward people in the area that like the team. We use Twitter Feed to push certain RSS entries to the Twitter and Facebook accounts.
We've spent about 70% of our budget on software licenses, which is what we originally budgeted for advertising, but we really wanted to be able to provide a great experience for fans. We hope to spend more on promotion in the coming months, particularly the period before and during the NCAA Big East conference games. We know it's a tough road to hoe in promoting a message board these days.
Personally, I've spent about 150 hours of my personal time putting this together, from the server/OS, SSL, email configuration, add-ons, promotion, trying to style, starting over with a style, trying to style, buying a style. But of course, everybody knows that's the easy part.
Goals
Provide the best site for Creighton Bluejay fans and their favorite team.
Generate unique Bluejay-based based content and opinions on the team and its competitors.
Thanks for visiting.
https://bluejay.zone
Twitter:
http://twitter.com/bluejayzone
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/bluejayzone
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TL;DR
Creighton Bluejay Message Board
https://bluejay.zone
Because the site isn't an instant success, one of the article and content providers has decided to move on, so it's basically just 2 guys now.
