20 Apr 2007 by Chris     No Comments    Posted under: News/Media/Sport

The Ipswich Town website: cost effectively maximising income and reach, of course

Fans on our mailing list were discussing the awfulness of our own (and most other football clubs’) websites. But “Premium TV provides proprietary ‘end to end’ solutions that enable content owners to cost effectively maximise income and reach through the creation and distribution of multi-platform digital products”, it says here. And who can argue with that? (By the way, net nerds will love to visit the PremiumTV site or their new www.chelseafc.com site to see a real blast from the past – a Netscape favicon).

I suspect it’s not so much how much Ipswich Town receives, but more likely how much the club saves by not having to pay for it. An online presence is still seen by most businesses as a necessary evil rather than the fantastic opportunity it is, and I bet the club handed the web site over to PremiumTV more to save the money they were paying to local website company AWS than to receive the PremiumTV income. The same happened almost everywhere, as you can see with the drop-down at http://www.premiumtv.co.uk/page/Clients

Unfortunately almost every professional football club feels it’s above utilising the astonishing skill set in its own fan base, and there’s obviously nobody at our club (or most others) who knows enough about the internet to set up an internal web site management operation, so the job will always go outside. And with finances as they are, it’ll go to the lowest (and probably least interested) bidder, which is exactly what’s happened.

With an ex-advertising guy as our CEO, I’d always hoped we’d see the potential of online publicity (and how to exploit it) better than other clubs, but I was wrong. So people go to www.twtd.co.uk rather than the club site for the news and the chat, and to www.prideofanglia.com for the history, stats and trivia. And we all know where the best video is.

The ITFC site in years gone by:
(yes, the internet archive is very slow!)

1997 – still run by fans…
…as the history explains

2001 – …still run by the club

2001/2002 – we’re too big for that now…
…so we’ll get it done by a Proper Company

2003 – oh sod it, let’s just look like everyone else (yawn)

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