Most fans have their favorite kinds of sports or sports leagues and naturally want to follow them online, among other things. Consequently, web site owners need to provide them with a smooth transition from off-line mass media to online sport leagues and vice versa. 

However, online league user experience should give them even more opportunities to get plentiful and detailed information regarding their favorites (players, teams or championships), to socialize, comment and discuss current and past results, to feel in the thick of things, events and people.

It is certainly a complicated task requiring professional sports software. For Joomla web site owners below we present 15 hints to ease this burden and fine-tune league web sites to get plentiful grateful feedback from visitors.

To this purpose you can take advantage of the dedicated software products by BearDev including Joomla! CMS sport extension, JoomSport add-ons and dedicated Joomla templates able to provide you with all necessary features and beyond.

1. Responsive Layout

Nowadays, responsive interface is a mandatory component of great user experience enabling visitors to stay in touch with their hobby or professional activity on the 24/7 basis. Responsive design also makes your Google desktop and mobile rankings more successful.  

JoomSport hint: In order to correspond to the best examples of UI you have to implement responsive Joomla CMS templates, e.g. Joomla responsive sport template Kodiak. You should also make sure that all the extensions used on your site are also responsive. For that you can utilize the JoomSport responsive add-on making all your sport pages mobile friendly.

2. Teams Branding

Team logos added to their names makes content perception more convenient allowing fans to find their teams in seconds within the crowded calendars and Standings.

JoomSport hint: The smallest acceptable size of logo images is 30x30 px. The recommended size of logos in the new coming JoomSport release will be 100x100 px.

3. Photos in Web Site Style

Already known, that users perceive visuals much better than texts and often abandon too long descriptions. You should add multiple photos to players, teams, matches, and venues setting the tone of your professional league in this way.

JoomSport hint: The optimal size of illustrative pictures should be between 200 and 800 px width that is enough for both great  picture quality and site performance. The consistency of photo dimensions within a gallery is also very important since different sizes and aspect ratios of photos make them looking sloppy and unattractive.

BD: Hi, Roberto! Nice to see you. And, right of the bat, let’s start with your vision of the e-Sports industry and your company’s niche inside of it.

RL: Hi BearDev team, first of all let me thank you and your team for this opportunity. As you know, there have always been videogames tournaments among friends and, at a low scale, in specialized shops or in local associations. These events were clearly amateur-oriented, with the addition of some national or even international events, but the 90s are clearly a step forward for professional and competitive gaming.Over the last years, the e-Sports recognition increased a lot and this is mainly due to the industry created around it. Leagues and events organized by the Electronic Sports League (ESL) for example, or even by the developers of the most competitively successful games themselves, such as Riot (League of Legends), Blizzard Entertainment (Starcraft, Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm), Valve (DotA and Counter Strike), or Activision (Call of Duty) take advantage of the media the same way as big regular sport events do.The key figure to understand the impact of e-Sports is 32 million viewers for the Finale of the League of Legends Season 3 World Championship in 2013, which was higher than the NBA play-offs of the same year.Regarding the Electronic Sports MastersTM (ESMTM), as you said, our objective is to promote e-Sports as well as the principles and values of the International e-Sports Federation (IeSF), but focusing on a single game, ARMA III.

BD: Is it true that e-Sports involve only a thin layer of the society mainly consisting of young people between 21 and 34 years old? And, what is your current audience structure?

RL: Having a look at the current evolution, I would even say younger, as kids now seem to be born with a tablet in their hands. Regarding Arma 3, it is a bit different because a big part of its community, players and ideas men are following the saga since its beginning in 2001 with the release of Operation Flashpoint… and it was 14 years ago. More recently, we decided to get figures about the average age among our audience, here are the results:

• 38.9% between 20 and 25;
• 22.2% older than 36;
• 16.7% between 26 and 30;
• 16.7%between 31 and 35;
• 5.6% younger than 20.

* Around 40% are players older than 31.

This shows that the ARMA III community is made of experienced players mainly due to the game developer company itself, Bohemia Interactive, which gave the code in open source as well as the tools allowing add-ons and mods to be created. About BI, I would like to add that their business model and the way they take care of the community are simply unique. Just have a look at the life duration of their games and free content they develop, such as e.g. the latest update “Nexus” released in November or the next one called “Eden” to be released at the beginning of 2016 with a powerful 3D edition tool, and as I said, everything is free!These are the things that make a player/customer faithful to the saga and create his special connection with the company.

BD: e-Sports seem to become a highly competitive market. How do you take the blow? What are the most important success components for you?