Tuesday, August 26, 2014

College Football Weekly Challenges

College Football is finally here!  That means there are tons of different options for creating weekly challenges.  Let's get right to a few examples to showcase the options we make possible:

Here's a challenge to pick the top games of the week against the spread - you can include whatever games you are most interested in:




Here's a challenge to predict the scores for every SEC game for the week - you can do this for any conference, the local schools in your area, or whatever matchups you find most compelling:



And finally, here's a challenge for Mizzou's first game - you can customize it for whatever team you want and any category you can think of:



Those are just a few of the possibilities.  The beauty of Challenge Builder is that you can fully customize your challenge, whether you want to focus on the top national games or your local Division II matchup.  Get started today!

- The Challenge Builder Team

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Friday Night Lights

High School Football has already started up for many areas.  If you are a site that covers High School Football, Challenge Builder is perfect for creating weekly contests for the area teams.  Whether it's just for fun, or you (or a sponsor) give out a prize to the winner, everyone likes a good competition.  We make it easy to customize your contest for just the teams you and your readers care about.

Here's an example of a simple contest to pick the winners for the top area games of the week:




If you only cover one team, you can customize a contest just for that team.  For example:




There are plenty of weeks left, so go to Challenge Builder and get started today!  And as always, give us a shout if you have any questions.

- The Challenge Builder Team

Sunday, August 17, 2014

Take a Premium Challenge for a Test Drive

Do you have your own website, and you're wondering how to embed a challenge and what it would look like on your site?  Go ahead and take one for a test drive - just follow the steps below to embed this sample challenge on a page on your own site.

Once you've created your own custom challenge on Challenge Builder, we provide you with a single line of code that you can use to embed that challenge on your own site.  For our example - here is the challenge we created.  And here is the code to embed it on your site:

<iframe src="http://www.challengebuilder.com/show_iframe.jsp?id=553&access_key=1463023a953136294ac5f1d4b82b092a" style="height: 1560px; width: 100%;"></iframe>

Here's what the result looks like:



If the challenge doesn't fit great on your site, you can adjust the dimensions yourself by changing the height/width numbers highlighted in that code.  For example, here's the result for the following modified dimensions:

<iframe src="http://www.challengebuilder.com/show_iframe.jsp?id=553&access_key=1463023a953136294ac5f1d4b82b092a" style="height: 600px; width: 600px;"></iframe>



Note: If your site is built on WordPress, you may need one extra step if you haven't used iframes before.  Here is an iframe plugin for WordPress, and here is a video with instructions on how to install it.  The format for this is slightly different: [iframe src="http://www.challengebuilder.com/show_iframe.jsp?id=553&access_key=1463023a953136294ac5f1d4b82b092a" width="100%" height="1560"]

That's all there is to it!  If you want to get started, or have any questions, just contact us at info@challengebuilder.com.

- The Challenge Builder Team

Saturday, August 9, 2014

Introducing...joining challenges with just an email address!

In the past, we required either a Facebook or Google account to login to Challenge Builder to either create a challenge or join a challenge.  This worked great for a large number of users, but we still heard feedback that many people wanted the option to join a challenge without having either of these accounts.  Well good news for these people - we are pleased to announce that we have now added the functionality to allow people to join a challenge by simply entering their email address!

Now when users join a challenge either on challengebuilder.com or using our iframe plugin on a third party website, they will be presented with the following options to save their picks:


The Facebook and Google login options still will work the same as before, but now users can join by simply entering their name and email address as well.  With this new option, users are not creating a full account, so there is no need to create a password.  They are simply joining a single challenge, with one click of a button.

The Name submitted is what is displayed in the Standings, so that the email address is kept private.  Email address is requested in order to keep the entries unique (only one entry per email address is allowed), and in case the winners need to be contacted.  The same email address can later be used to check out how you did once the challenge has been scored.

We are excited to offer this new functionality based on your feedback.  As always, we welcome additional feedback - just shoot us a note at info@challengebuilder.com.

- The Challenge Builder Team