A few days ago I launched a new website. Kind of.
FantasyHockeySim.com went live last Thursday. The site plays host to a couple simulated fantasy hockey leagues using the FHLSim software. Through FHS, league members can manage their teams in real-time, as opposed to all kinds of manual data entry that is required by FHLSim out of the box.
And if that sounds familiar, it might be because up until FantasyHockeySim.com launched, all of that was a part of DetroitHockey.Net. FHS is simply that functionality spun off into its own site.
One of the leagues that had been hosted at DH.N, the National Hockey Association, is the official league of SportsLogos.Net. And some of its members were not happy about having to be members of a Red Wings site to do their fantasy hockey. So I decided to move things to a neutral site.
With the fantasy hockey side of things no longer reliant on DetroitHockey.Net infrastructure, this would also allow me to update the two sites more easily.
Originally, the site was going to be called FHLSite, as that’s what I had referred to my software as when it was a part of DH.N. I had a hard time coming up with a logo for that, though, so I changed the name to FantasyHockeySim.com, abbreviated FHS.
For the logo, I took the shield from DH.N’s primary logo and changed the colors to gray and blue, then put the letters FHS over the top of it. A pair of crossed hockey sticks – the sticks from the DH.N logo, appear behind the shield.
The basic site design was ported over directly from DetroitHockey.Net but the header and footer were updated. For the main site and each league, the basic elements of the template are the same, with branding images and an accent color swapped out to provide uniqueness. The main site is a blue-gray while the DFHL is red and the NHA is a dark blue.
The biggest change was the replacement of the DH.N Community Forums as a communication hub and an identity provider. DH.N’s Invision Power Board installation is integrated into the entire site, which included the fantasy hockey side of things. It would not be available upon moving to a new domain.
I decided to create a team on Slack and build a login system around it. I’ll write more about this in a future post on lessons learned about the Slack API, but the short version is that their OAuth workflow and API combined to allow me to have users with accounts on the FHS Slack team log in to the main FHS site and see their unread message counts, effectively replicating the functionality of the forums.
The end result is something curious, where I’ve launched a new site but created virtually no new functionality. I think it’s a good starting point, though.
