Sneak peak at new Colts homepage

In all the hubub around our recent announcement of mycolts.net, let’s not forget the Colts are also in the process of redesigning our main Website. The current version of colts.com is about to get a facelift; and along with improved look, we’re doing some cool stuff under the hood as well.

As you can see we’ve mellowed out the overall color scheme and one our best to reduce “noise”, thanks to our graphic design partner, Hotbed Creative. What you can’t see is that we’re integrating the site very tightly with our fan network.

Our plan is to allow free, anonymous viewing for Colts fans at the main site, but if fans want to dig deeper, comment on stories, etc., then they’ll be promped to register for (or simply log into) the Colts Fan Net. Registered users will have an expanded set of privilages. Eventually, we plan to add a “premium” level of content / permissions which users would need to pay to access.

Once fans are registered members of the Colts Fan net, they get can earning points for their behaviors – building up their good reputations – so that their posts, their blogs, etc. might find their way to public pages. We’re even considering allowing comments from the Fan Forum to make it all the way to the main colts.com home page (see Fan Forum section). In fact, earning the ability to have your comments reach the home page may be the first “premium” privilage that fans will pay for. It’s a thought.

Allowing user generated contents to reach our home page carries significant risk, so we’ll tread lightly at first. But the temptation is strong to allow it. After all, every fan wants his or her 15 minutes of fame, and we believe our site visits and page views would spike nicely!