Company: Fantasy Football Toolbox
Launched: 1996
Full time: 2007
Site: www.fftoolbox.com
It would probably be a bit of an exaggeration to say that everyone who starts up their own website (or any other business) does so with the ultimate goal of making a living with it. One would have to imagine, though, that most such ventures are built on that dream.
Jeff Christiansen, for one, enjoys spending all of his professional effort on the site he has been running for 12 years.
“I enjoyed programming, but I’m happy to be my own boss,” he says of running FFToolbox.com full time since 2007.
Christiansen — a former ColdFusion programmer — launched Fantasy Football Arsenal in summer 1996, as an outlet for the publication of fantasy football cheatsheets he was already compiling.
“I realized I was onto something when I started getting emails from people asking me for help with their teams and to update my rankings,” he said.
What he also soon realized as the site began to get more visitors was that it shared its name with a popular member of probably the world’s best known sports league — England’s Premiership. The arrival of e-mails from Arsenal fans asking where they could find information on their favorite football team led Christiansen to his current online residence at FFToolbox.com.
Fantasy Football Toolbox got in early on the game of fantasy advice and continues to pride itself on the kind of technological advantage one would expect from a site created by a programmer.
“We try to stay on top of the latest technology,” Christiansen says. “For example, we offer several different RSS feeds, we launched our weekly online fantasy football radio show in August, and we have a fan page on Facebook.”
Also, as you might expect from the name, the site features a number of draft- and management-related tools. Player rankings go deep enough to even include offensive lines, return men and punters. Myriad tools help users do everything from getting to know the players to preparing their draft work area to even naming their teams.
The team-name generator offers five categories from which it will randomly offer 20 possible names at a time. A few quick clicks offered me winners such as “Preferred Woodchucks,” “Enthusiastic Moose,” “Familiar Cockroaches,” “Rotten Lions” (which is, of course, already taken by a real NFL team), “Useless Dingoes,” “Comprehensive Backhoes,” “Enormous Screwdrivers” (which will quickly be appropriated by that one male friend of yours who doesn’t know why he isn’t married yet) and “Corporate Stallions” (the team of CEOs that no one else in the bowling league likes).
The most worthwhile tool on the site, though, has to be the customizable cheatsheets, which allow users to adjust for their scoring systems, league sizes and roster sizes.
Although the site’s name contains only football, Fantasy Football Toolbox offers content in other areas as well. In addition to the 10 freelance writers covering the primary focus, five writers are devoted to the NFL Draft, five more to baseball and one to NASCAR. Baseball and NBA Draft coverage were just added this year, while the NFL Draft joined the menu in 2006 and NASCAR pulled in back in 2004.
The site turns a profit and supports its freelance staff with the advertising that was added in 2001, Christiansen says, and because he brought with him the programming background, the startup costs were minimal. Fantasy Football Toolbox also offers all of its features for free in an interface that is purposely devoid of unnecessary aesthetic treats.
“We focus on having a clean, fast and easy-to-use interface without a lot of unnecessary images or effects,” Christian says.
As we reported last night, 17 candidates are up for election to five spots on the board of directors for the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. As you might have noticed, four of those people are board incumbents. That might lead one to wonder about the remainder of the current board.
