GearScores.com

GearScores is a community gaming website created in 2009 during the height of popularity of a game called World of Warcraft also called WoW. During this time, WoW had amassed 12 million monthly subscribers, pulling in over $150 million per month in subscriptions alone. It was by far the most popular video game at the time. As a fan of the game, I wanted to make a website for the community and if it was successful then perhaps a little money along the way.

GearScores.com is based on the most popular companion software (aka addon) for the game at the time. Players could install an addon to the game called "Gear Score" and it would automatically show you a number calculated based on how powerful their characters armor and weapons were. It made it easy to find people that could play with you and do the most difficult content in the game. Here is where my website comes in.

Using my website a person could easily look up any character in the game, without ever installing the addon. It also offered other features, such as the ability to create a custom forum image based on their in-game characters stats, and provides the code needed to copy/paste into their signature on most of the popular forums at the time. The image was generated server-side and on-demand on my website. I programmed the code myself using PHP and it was quick and efficient.

There is also a login system that I coded myself. Players can sign up for an account on the website and use it to leave comments on any character on the website. Comments were automatically moderated through an external service provider before they were allowed to be displayed on the website.

The website was quite popular during its time. It received thousands of page views per day, received referrals from many different community gaming websites, and had a very high SEO score. It was the top result in many different keyword searches.