Numerous sports leagues are being played around the world, and now it is just a matter of a few clicks to access any live sports on the tiny screen. The internet world isn’t favorable only for sports lovers but has also been opened the doors to earn money.
It’s not surprising that people are making a huge income by monetizing their websites. If you have sound knowledge in any of the sports, there aren’t any hurdles to cash it out through a sports blog. By giving some dedicated time, you can easily make around $50,000 in a year.
So, the question arises; what is the right approach to start creating a sports website to make extra income?
Well, the contribution of a team of technical experts, UX designers, and data analysts makes a perfect sports website. But this guide is specially created for individual who wants to share their sports knowledge with worldwide readers through blogging.
So, let’s see the best design principles for sports websites to decrease bounce rate by keeping the readers busy within your site. Simultaneously, it will help you to generate handsome income in less possible time.
Nail the Sports Niche
Hundreds of sports leagues are available worldwide, so it is impossible to cover everything on a website. So, the process of creating a sports website starts with the selection of games you want to give an update about. Based on your knowledge and user’s demand, shortlisting one or two sports are enough to initiate. Buaksib is one of the nice examples of how they integrated football highlights into their design and newsfeed.
Clear a Goal
You need to identify whether you want to design a sports website just to share your knowledge with like-minded people or you want to increase your subscriber or followers. Alternatively, you might be planning to monetize it through sponsored products or affiliate marketing.
Setting a clear goal is essential because it is directly proportional to the website layout and experience you provide to the users. Sbobet, for instance, gives its visitors daily updates on major sports events and football highlights videos in case you missed the game.
Logo and Website Theme
Whatever the sports you have chosen to start your sports blog must give the feel starting from the logo, landing page experience, responsiveness, and overall website theme.
In the case of WordPress, you must choose a lightweight theme matching your logo color and sports theme.
As per the research, it has been found that the percentage of males are curious than females to know and surf the sports sites. So, pay attention to aligning the colors and element placement by analyzing your audience’s necessity in mind.
Clear Navigation
A sports website must feature the following information, and that should be placed nicely from the first fold to the footer section of a sports website. This way, you can serve more updates to the users and engage them for staying a long time on your site.
Must-Have Features on a Sport Website
- Flash Score
- Leader Board Updates
- Team Roaster
- Upcoming Events Calendar
- Social Sharing Button
- Player’s Biography & Profile
Speed & User Experience
Approximately 6.38 billion people are accessing the internet through mobile devices. It means, around 80% of worldwide mobile users are spending time accessing the required information over the internet.
If you want to grab even one percent of total mobile users to your website, you need to design an ultra-fast mobile responsive site. The layout, menu items, and popups must be well designed with less distraction.
A super-fast web page speed can be achieved by investing in a high uptime web hosting server. In the case of offering a video gallery on your sports site, you need to serve it through CDN without losing the page speed.
Subscription Form for Newsletter
Subscription forms or lead generation forms help in multiple ways to retarget your existing audience. Enabling the subscription form on your site would collect the user’s data with their permission. Further, you can reach them out with your latest blog article. Slowly you can send them strategic newsletters for the best deals if you sell affiliate or sponsored items on the website.
Voice Search
Smart devices like Alexa, Nest Home, and Home Pod are ready to replace text search activities with voice search to get all needful info just by speaking. As the technology upgrades too frequently, you must design your website to appear on voice search results. If it is ignored, you may lose mass readers who could not land your site due to inconvenience for voice search.
Smart Image Gallery of Ultimate Moments
It’s been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. To give the real feel of a sports league, you should create a responsive image gallery on your site. Adding comments and social sharing buttons below individual images would appeal to the users to share their thoughts. Based on engagements, these activities may help your site rank faster on the search engine result page (SERP).
Video Clips of Memorable Shots
If you have hosted the site on a dedicated server, streaming the live matches would be a hassle-free process. Else, it is not a bad idea to create a video library to showcase the best moments or memorable shots of world leagues. Alternatively, you can also create a YouTube channel, upload videos over there, and then embed them on your site to load faster at the user’s end.
Wrapping Up
The above-given list is some standard design principles for sports websites. If you are smartly executing all or most of the above things, soon you can get success in bringing huge traffic to your site. A step ahead, adding news and blog sections and updating them frequently will engage users and help them get more information about their favorite sports and players.
Following color guidelines from logo to fonts, featured images to widgets, and other places on the sports site will be easy to recognize in a short time. Also, do not make a mistake in selecting a broad name as a domain. It must be as short as possible and relevant to your selected sports niche. A short website name or URL is always easy to remember by the global audience that increases the rate of returning users to your site.
Disclaimer:
- As per the Public Gambling Act of 1867, all Indian states, except Goa, Daman and Sikkim, prohibit gambling
- Land-based casinos are legalized, with certain guidelines, in Goa and Daman, as per the Goa, Daman and Diu Public Gambling Act 1976
- Land-based casinos, Online gambling and E-gaming (games of chance) are legalized in Sikkim under the Sikkim Online Gaming (Regulation) Rules 2009
- Only some Indian states have legalized online/regular lotteries as per and subject to the conditions laid down by state laws. Kindly refer to the same here
- Horse racing and betting on horse racing, including online betting, is permitted only in a licensed premise in select states. Kindly refer to the 1996 Judgement by the Supreme Court Of India here and for more information
- This article does not endorse or express the views of Qrius and/or any of its staff.
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