I love sport. I’m not very good any any particular kind, but I’ll play almost anything. I have heaps of sports equipment I’ve used only a few times, and drawers of uncompleted sports-club application forms. I’m always keen to play, but the hardest part is finding someone to play against, or finding a team to play with that isn’t made up of semi-pro hotshots who played in their high-school first team.

So, SportMatchup is a community site for finding competitors. The site is first and entirely a mobile site: not only is mobile likely to be the primary user environment in the near future, but I really wanted to try out a free-site-building service called Motribe. Motribe’s super easy to use. Including designing a logo, it took me twenty minutes to set up a basic mobile site, including adding advertising from AdMob and InMobi – I enter my AdMob and InMobi IDs on the Motribe dashboard, and revenue from clicks will gather in my ad-publisher accounts. (UPDATE: Misunderstanding: Ad revenue is possible from upgraded, paid Motribe products; for free sites, ad revenue goes to Motribe, presumably to help sustain the free service). By default, the Motribe site gets a motribe.mobi domain, but I could point my own domain there instead, if I thought it worthwhile. For now, Motribe’s free service let’s me test the concept without even a domain-name-fee commitment.

Tools used: Motribe.com, logo done in Illustrator and optimised in Photoshop.

Process: Open a Motribe account, and enter some basic site details; design logo, upload to Motribe dashboard; drag-and-drop Motribe ‘plugins’ (site elements) and create city-specific chat rooms; write SportMatchup user guidelines; open ad-publisher accounts with AdMob and InMobi, and enter site IDs in Motribe dashboard. Make site live in Motribe dashboard.