5 Must-Have Features of a Football Website
Navigating today’s overcrowded digital landscape is a considerable feat. There are dozens of outlets giving your visitors up-to-date information accessible right on their fingertips. They can get every aspect of any sports life surrounding football. Making your website stand out from the crowd is a serious challenge. To win this race, you need the right tools and you need to give your visitors the right information when they need it and in the format in which they need it. This is a must if you want your football website to be successful. In this blog post, we will share with you our top 5 must-have features for you to achieve this by harnessing the power of a soccer api.
Live Scores
Live Scores provide real-time information about results on specific matches from various competitions. For example, the World Cup, UEFA EURO, or Copa America. This feature is one, if not the prime in which your users will be interested. This is WHAT people will be coming back for. Regardless of whether you are a news agency website or a betting website, having on-demand actual and actionable information is invaluable for the customers and their needs.
Fixtures
Previously we highlighted WHAT your user would be interested in. However, that information has to be bound and fixed at some point in time and place. That is where Fixtures come in place. They are the WHEN and WHERE users are interested in. And while WHERE is merely (in most cases) used as secondary information WHEN is the main focus point. Your website visitors will be focused on this mainly to allocate time in their busy schedule to view the event but also to see and compare with other matches in the same competition. This is crucial for news agencies and betting sites and services, as discussed previously.
Standings
Continuing with the same logic, through Fixtures we addressed the “comparison aspect” when viewing and following matches in similar leagues and championships. Comparisons are one of the cornerstones in competitive sports. Having Standings incorporated in your service gives your users the power to have an overview of the bigger picture and gives them an educated position on which they can capitalize on.
Match Events
With Standings, the users have an overview of the leaderboard. However, sometimes that information by itself is not enough. Your users are not all the same; their needs are not the same. Most will be casual participants in the services you provide; others will be more enthusiastic. Match events cater to the latter group of football enthusiasts by providing context to the specific match they are looking into. In this way, you are providing them with information on goal scorers and yellow/red cards. In that sense, match events + Standings = the HOW.
Historical Data
We now have the WHAT, the WHEN, the WHERE and the HOW. Although that is a very good combination of data points that will unequivocally provide a full platter of information, there is one feature we have yet to discuss – historical data. It provides the all-important measurement of a team or player progression over time and can show a user the probability of an outcome of a match.
Summary
Understanding your users’ particularities when it comes to habits, needs, and interests are art in and of itself. The aim is to provide them with a combination of features that will ultimately result in the service they require. That will undoubtedly help you grow as a company and a service that accurately understands what its users want and need.