Online Side Projects - Creating a P2E Website Using Canva

By Brando_28 | GameFi | 7 Sep 2023

If you have been following my blog you can probably tell that I'm a huge fan of blockchain games or play-to-earn games, as they say.

Now, if you are into these games like I am, you also know about the daily grinding and the never-ending search to gain that advantage in playing and earning. Besides that, if you are doing a little trading with all the game assets, you know the need to stay ahead of the game - to keep up with the updates and their effects on the asset prices.

This is an idea that has been bouncing back and forth in my mind for more than a year now: I've been thinking about how cool it would be to keep up with the news and updates "under the same umbrella", and to have a kind of a hub where I could check out the latest news of my favourite games with as little scrolling and clicking as possible.

One other idea that I definitely want to implement is what I call 'toolboxes'. You know, those helpful little third-party sites that each offer different useful tools to help you in your grinding. I know I have many of those scattered all over my browser folders and thought wouldn't it be great to add them to my site where they can be easily found next to the game?

So, these two ideas, news and tools, will form the backbone of my site at least for now. I have many other cool ideas to add in the future but I think with these two I can get it tested and perhaps get some idea how players are responding to something like this.

I have been kind of sketching it out on WordPress for some time now but noticed I got stuck very quickly in all the small details and it felt like the project wasn't going anywhere. That was until I released my artistic flow and tried to do the whole thing all over again but this time with Canva!

Creating A Website With Canva

I have been subscribing to Canva Pro for a couple of months now and it's amazing how many pictures, videos, shapes, and...well, everything there is to be used freely for personal or for commercial use. However, the one thing I didn't know was that you can also use Canva to create your own website and quite easily too! Here's how:

- Click the '+' sign to create a new design
- Search for 'website'
- Choose to use either existing templates, use different styles, or start from scratch
- Play around, and try out which works and which doesn't
- When you are done, click publish and choose if you want to publish to an existing domain, purchase a new one through Canva, or publish to a free Canva domain** and you are done!

Okay, this has to be said, Canva sites are very stripped and will lack many, many features compared to sites made with WordPress for example. No e-commerce, and no dropdown menus... basically, it's just items and embedded links. That being said, for a simple idea such as mine, it can actually produce a working website very fast.

I see it like this, Canva is a great tool to create the general look, and the overall appearance, and to test the idea and the first impression the visitor gets. I guess it's more of a website designer tool for creating landing pages but who knows, maybe they add some features in the future and it can truly become a player on the website creation scene.

The Outcome

Meanwhile, I'm actually feeling pretty happy with my site and with how quickly I got my ideas online for the first time. You can check out the site HERE.

I'm running WordPress locally and must say that it's working REALLY slowly, so when designing a website delays and waiting are, of course, huge inspiration killers. As I said, I like the idea that Canva lets me test out the ideas and see what's working and looking good. I don't think I'm able to export the whole site to WP as it is but I can export single elements or just create similar ones with Elementor plug-in.

As for the actual content of my site, I must say that it is very much under construction being only 2 days old. However, there are a few things I already like. The idea and the positioning of the news and & tools boxes are something I think I'll keep even though I might have to hide some of the stuff under dropdown menus to save some space.

If things seem to be picking up I surely need to scale up and rethink the whole appearance again. Until then, I'm gonna keep as simple as it is.

The name on the other hand is a working name and something I'm gonna change. Coming up with a good name is extremely difficult. I currently don't have a domain bought and when I do that, I need to have a good, memorable name - something I can easily brand and use across platforms.

Not Just About Visuals

If I analyze the two main ingredients of my site I would say the news part is something that attracts the visitors to come back again - that is if it's updated on a regular basis and users find it more handy than going through all the Discord announcements.

The tools part may also lure players to return if they once found a useful tool on the site and now have started playing a different game and want to check out if there's something for that too. I have many other ideas that can be added to the site in the future but I believe these two are a good start within the limitations of Canva website builder.

In addition to those, I have also added some basic stuff like links to Discord and blog, and also to Zealy if the game has an ongoing campaign there.

Future Plans

At the moment, this is a side project for me but I'm planning to take things further in developing the site as my short-term goal is to release a WP version of it. If things go well and there's demand for this kind of website, I'm also thinking of creating a Hive community around it, taking it to [Leo Threads](https://leofinance.io/threads), and perhaps creating an account for it and curating related posts.

You may have noticed that so far I have added games from three different chains: Hive, WAX, and ONIX. I'm actually planning on keeping it that way for a while mainly because I am currently not playing any p2e games outside these networks and keeping things up to date would require more intense following. Another reason is that I don't want it to become too bloated in the early stages especially not before the structure is finalized.

As I mentioned, the idea is still very young and many things can change along the way. If you have any comments, criticisms, suggestions, tips, or anything, they are more than welcome. Also, if have a game you'd like to be featured on the site in the future, let me know!

Oh, and if you come up with an amazing name, feel free to share! If you wish to follow this journey on how the project develops, here's the link https://plan8play.my.canva.site/. I know, it looks terrible. Working on it.

Thank you for reading!