Official websites

Every major event needs a high-quality internet portal, with the emphasis placed firmly on content over design and on substance over style. Satisfying sports fans hunger for information is paramount

The internet and sport are nowadays firmly linked together. Many people follow their favourite activities online, often keeping tabs on their chosen sports through the official websites of that sport’s governing bodies.

An Olympic website will generate many millions of hits

Football’s governing body, Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), considers the web so crucial that they made internet company Yahoo! an official partner for the 2002 and 2006 World Cups. In one day alone, 226 million pages of its website, fifaworldcup.yahoo.com, were viewed. By comparison, 2005’s hugely publicised Live 8 series of concerts, held across the globe, only generated 90 million “page views” during a whole weekend.

“A website is today an essential part of any major sports federation’s promotion and coverage of a major championships or tournament,” says Sean Wallace-Jones, new media manager of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF). “It provides a platform for the promotion of the event for journalists and fans alike, and ongoing coverage and provision of results and news in real-time during the competition itself.”

The IAAF’s site is successful, but far less popular than FIFA’s. During the Athletics World Championships, the organisation receives up to 200,000 page views daily, and annually receives an estimated 150-200 million.

“There are many factors in running a sports website,” says Wallace-Jones. “It has many of the requirements of a top-level news site, in providing rapid coverage of the events – however it also has to provide a totally impartial and balanced view in its coverage and guarantee 100 per cent accuracy insofar as results and associated data are concerned. What is more, the depth of information provided has to satisfy the requirements of fans and enthusiasts, as well as sports journalists covering the event for their respective media. It also has to be as simple as possible to cater for the diversity of origins of our visitors.”

Leo Mindel is director of Sotic, a sports website specialist which runs sites for many sports clubs and events, including rugby’s European Cup. Mindel also points to content as the most important factor in a site.

FIFA’s World Cup 2006 website received
226m hits in one day alone

“A sports website must always be mindful of the needs of the site’s users,” he says. “These fans will demand two major things: the latest results, and the latest news. These must also be supplemented with pictures, audio and video.

“As a result, sports websites by their very nature should be thought of as a news source with a substantially higher turnover of content than a traditional brochure-style site. Therefore it could be argued that the quality, quantity and accuracy of the content are more important than the look and feel of the site. While design is important, a reasonable-looking site packed full of content and updated within seconds will always outperform a stunning looking but empty site, and emphasis should always be placed on how easily and how quickly a site can be updated.“
           
However, tournament websites face two very different challenges – running a website before the tournament, and running the website during the height of the action.
           
“During a major championships the big change is in the number of editorial staff and support staff required,” says Wallace-Jones. “We employ a number of freelance specialists to write for us during the championships and they work with us on site. As we have real-time results from the championships, there is also a large number of staff working with our IT department on the results service, in collaboration with Seiko Timing and Epson, with the latter handling the data processing of the results.“
           
Mindel agrees that the tournament itself provides a different challenge for an organising body.
           
“During the event, a tournament website can receive more traffic in two hours than an average site receives in two months,” he says. “The other crucial element is sporting statistics. Statistics, such as results, times, and scores are the site’s internal clock, and need to be integrated into the site from day one.”
           
As technology moves on, tournament websites are becoming more sophisticated. For World Cup 2006, FIFA introduced streaming videos, allowing viewers all over the world to watch highlights of the competition. On average during the second week, 523,000 videos were downloaded each day.

“Technological innovation is a never-ending process,” says Sean Wallace-Jones. “The greatest effect is that people continually want more and better coverage, faster. The question is finding the balance between the costs of providing cutting-edge technology, the benefits that these can provide to visitors to the site, and the delicate matter of rights issues. We also have to take into account the needs of those who do not have high-speed internet access or the latest computers and software. Our aim is to provide a website that is as up-to-date as possible, visually and technically, whilst still providing access to all.”

Mindel points to how new technologies have added to the ways organisers can communicate with fans via the internet.

“The addition of RSS feeds and podcasting means that it is far easier and quicker for an official site to get their view across than it was in the past,” he says. “This is especially important because the only site working for the relevant governing body is their own site – the media always has the ability to spin the story as they want, rather than how the governing body wish it to be delivered.”

Mindel also draws attention to the websites’ hardware – arguing that the computers that store the information must be extremely flexible.

He says: “Any sensible solution should be hosted on a clustered server farm that has the ability to grow and shrink as needed during the peaks that a tournament generates.  It is also better to look at some of the large front-end caching companies like Akamai to help deliver during the major peaks.”