Matt Coddington

I haven’t bought a website in quite a bit, but when StarCraft 2 was announced I started looking around at some of the old fansites that I used to regular back when I ran my first website which was a SC/BW news and downloads site. I discovered that pretty much all of the old juggernauts that ruled StarCraft in 2000 were still the top dogs - not entirely surprising, but refreshing nonetheless since that meant if I did decide to get back into the SC niche that I would already know most of the competition very well.

One of the fansites I regulared was CreepColony.com. It is pretty much the same as it was 7 years ago, with a tiny upgrade - hella traffic. After the announcement of StarCraft 2, CreepColony’s traffic has increased by 211% and is still on the rise! There are now only 2 StarCraft websites that seem to be performing better than it traffic-wise and that is because they just get a ton of search engine traffic. Luckily, I know a bit about SEO, so I believe I can compete with them for that search traffic.

There are a couple problems with the site, however. First off I think it’s pretty clear that the design is extremely ugly. CreepColony was a hobby site for its entire existence, so the design wasn’t a top priority. Now that I’m running it, my first objective is to get a design upgrade. I’ve already finished the design (a snippet is in the image at the top) and will be implementing it soon.

Another problem is that the site is *ALL* hard-coded HTML, so I’ll have to port it all to a CMS (WordPress). This also leaves me with not only a ton of content to move but a *TON* of 301 redirects to do. I’m also a little nervous about moving all of the content to new URL structures because I don’t want to lose what search engine traffic I have, but after reading some articles I think I can safely move the pages and retain the search traffic with 301 redirects. We shall see.

Finally, the site is currently severely under-monetized. There is a single, unblended Adsense block at the top of the page which is the only source of revenue. Because of this I was able to get the site for a great price, but I also don’t really know the revenue potential. With the amount of traffic the site is getting, I really do expect that I can turn a great profit, but it will be a guessing game for a while.