Necessity often breeds invention and that was the case for Zach Jex.

After spending more than eight years at Ole Miss, Jex made a lot of friends. But seeing them was becoming harder and harder.

Jex and his wife, Shannon of Natchez often attend Ole Miss football games and the time before kick off is spent catching up with old friends in the Grove. But at each game, time was wasted searching for tents.

To eliminate that problem, Jex developed a tailgate mapping Web site, gamedaymap.com., that allows tailgaters to plot their tent on a map and make it available for others to find.

“It was out of necessity really,” he said. “You can’t hear your phone and you probably can’t dial out anyway so having something that shows you where everyone is tailgating should be helpful to people.”

The site launched on Oct. 16 and has approximately 40 tents already plotted.

Jex said people are being driven to the site through word of mouth and Internet postings.

“Out of everyone that is on there, I probably know five people,” he said. “People are finding out about it on Facebook and different college football sites like rivals.com and scout.com.”

When a user logs into the site, they plot their tent location, give it a name and hometown, and give a physical description of the location.

“What is nice is the physical description that tells where the tent is,” Jex said. “That is how someone would tell you to get to their tent if you were calling them on the phone.

“They can say ‘We are two tents off sorority row,’ and people will know exactly where that is.”

Once a tent is plotted, that user has a profile that other people can view. The profile lists details such as food, drinks, theme or special events that might be happening at that week’s tailgate.

“That is where you can put in all the extras that you have like if you are going to have satellite television or something at your tailgate,” he said.

Users can login through existing Facebook and Twitter accounts or create a login specifically for the Gameday Map site.

The site also allows people to comment on the tailgate either before or after the game.

“What we hope that is used for is for people to contact the folks they are going to be tailgating with,” he said.

Jex worked with developers in India to create the site. He had a picture in his mind and his developers made it a reality, he said.

“The hard part was that India is 11 and a half hours ahead of us so when I’m getting up, they are ending their day,” he said. “We did basically all of this through e-mail with maybe two conversations on Skype.”

Jex started with Ole Miss but said, if the first site gets a good response, he will look to add more teams for the 2010 football season.

“We will definitely start in the SEC, probably LSU would be next,” he said.

The map used on the site is a Google map that was updated specifically for Jex’s site, he said.

“The developers were having trouble putting in the circle sidewalk so they contacted Google, and they updated it for us and put in all the buildings,” he said. “Then we went in and put the trees where they were supposed to be so it is accurate.”

So far the site has had more than 5,000 page views with 86 percent of them being unique page views.

“The more people that use this site, the more people will be able to use the site,” Jex said. “If more people come on and plot their tents, more people can search for the tailgates that they want to attend.”

Tailgaters have to plot their tent each week to make sure the site is as up-to-date as possible for each home game.

However, once a user logs in and plots a tent once, that user gets a personal site address that will be the same each time they register a tailgating tent.