You should start a website for your local FGC, and here’s how

It’s pretty common practice to have at least a Discord server for your regional FGC be it at a state or city level, but how do you get the word out? Sure, you could post about it on social media and get your locals to boost the post or repost it to other social networks. Streaming your locals on Twitch and uploading your VODs somewhere visible also helps show interested parties that you are indeed active. But how do you really get the word out to people who are complete strangers to you and your locals?

You get on Google. You should always be able to punch in “[your region here] FGC” and get a hit, since that’s where people who have no idea where to look will go first. But don’t just take it from me, take it from @KenstarFGC who described just how important this effort has been for their scene:

It's easy to underestimate how hard it is to find your scene as an outsider, being able to google "ohio fgc" or "ohio fighting games" and the first result is a site that shows them events near them and contact info for the folks running them is invaluable

— Tommy Toledo (@KenstarFGC) April 6, 2023

Get your community all in one place

The benefits of a website for your locals is pretty plain to see when you open any of these up. Most prominent is the ability to host a public event calendar, which can be set up in just a few minutes through Google Calendar and embedded onto the site. This makes it easy for people who aren’t in your Discords or following you on socials to keep tabs on what’s coming up next.

Speaking of that, one of the best qualities of a single site is being able to aggregate information to a single point. Sometimes a region has multiple Discord servers and organizers all have their own Twitter accounts, so it can be difficult to keep tabs on all of them. This is especially true as people move off of Twitter or decide to just pay less attention to social media. Hosting a site that can list that info is a big boon to getting everyone out there.

The Ohio FGC website is a pretty good example of how you can take this to the next level, listing out all the relevant links and people to follow for a given region within the state. You can scale all of this down to a one-pager or list out sub-regions on their own pages depending on your needs, but all of these sites remain useful in the same ways. The Tennessee FGC site is a good example of a one-page approach to this. So how do you get started, and how much do you really need to know about setting up a website to get there?

Check out the Ohio FGC Website Template

Ohio FGC organizer Corjam released a repository on GitHub for the previous design of the Ohio website. This has been used to kickstart quite a few state-level sites across the USA such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and others.

You can set this up and get it live with just a few changes of text right in GitHub’s editor, and then host it completely free using the GitHub Pages service. If you’d like to upgrade from a subdomain (i.e. yourfgc.github.io) to a domain you own that’ll cost you likely no more than $20 or $30 a year on services like Namecheap.

GitHub’s documentation on using their Pages service walks you through the process of setting it up right in your browser. If you’re going to use Corjam’s template, you need to create a new repository by clicking “Fork” on the OhioFGC repository instead of a blank one as described in the guide.

When you’re editing the template you should only need to change the “index.html” file to customize it for your region. Keep a reference like the W3Schools HTML Reference guide handy if you’re not sure what all the tags mean when changing things. You can always dive into customizing the CSS and adding more niceties via Javascript if you’d like, but it really isn’t necessary and wasn’t done for the examples I’ve shown above. After you’re satisfied with the site you can link a domain if you wish.

You can also always just make your own website from scratch! I personally recommend Github Pages for hosting, and you can make much more complex designs like Faustian’s homepage with the same solution.

Regional FGC Sites on SuperCombo Wiki

Since we’re likely to see many regions spring up their own pages we’ve created a page over on the SuperCombo Wiki Community Portal to list them out by region. Want to add your own? Head on over to the SuperCombo Discord and request your account to begin editing in just a few minutes.