This is the third post by our guest blogger, Owain Evans
As an avid football fan, it’s a daily occurrence for me to visit websites and apps to keep up-to-date to all the latest news. Being an Arsenal fan, Arsenal.com is my usual destination with BBC Sport and Sky Sports being other well-visited sites. But recently, I found myself wondering what other clubs’ websites look like, so I did some research. The results were truly shocking…
With it being 2016, you’d expect all big football clubs and big businesses to have good quality websites; an attractive, clean interface, easy to use, avoidance of information overkill etc. This is not the case. Firstly, I found that 6 of the 20 Premier League clubs’ websites had exactly the same layout, just different content relevant for each club. Unfortunately, as I delved deeper I found cluttered homepages, dated fonts, empty tabs, internal 404 errors and even advertisements for other clubs’ merchandise! Website after website had these faults in varying degrees, but one website stands out, and they just so happen to be (according to Forbes) the 2nd biggest club in the world: Manchester United.
I implore you to look at this monstrosity of a website with its messy homepage, excessive use of tabs and links (no less than 27, in fact) down its left-side and miniscule text in an awful font covering the entirety of the centre. You’d have thought that a club/business worth £2.233bn with a revenue of £395m could at the very least have a decent website for its estimated 370m fans worldwide. I’m certain that Manchester United has a “media team” made up of young, eager university graduates but none of them seem to see these flaws and be able to fix them.
I could list all of the bad websites but I think it’d be easier to list the good ones. The best in my opinion is undoubtedly Arsenal, all bias aside. Chelsea, Everton, Liverpool, Man City, Sunderland and West Ham (even though I found an ad for Arsenal’s kit on it, most likely due to remarketing) have good websites. The rest are, quite frankly, terrible and ugly.
Although this all might seem quite petty and pedantic, I think it’s of the utmost importance to have a good-looking, well-organised website. The first thing most people do these days is look at a business’ website to get a feel for what they do and the way they present themselves. Without prior knowledge you’d have thought that some of these clubs were amateurs when in fact they’re multi-million pound companies. That’s why at InSynch we take care when building our websites to make sure they reflect our clients’ values and interests.
If any of the Premier League clubs want to contact us for a new website, we’d be happy to help…
Owain Evans
photo credit: Old Trafford via photopin (license)