On October 5th the FFA launched all of the new websites for the Hyundai A league, and as expected there were a few glitches that needed to be sorted out. Mind you sorting them out while the season is underway is always going to be much harder than in the off season.
Two months have now passed and the migration of some of the data that was promised, such as the results from previous seasons in the A League the Youth League and the W league has not happened.
In addition to this a number of the websites simply do not function as they should. This weekend clicking on several of the club’s Youth league players hoping to get profile information saw their news page open up.
Then the information on the sites is frequently incorrect, The Brisbane Roar W League reserve goalkeeper Hoshimi Kishi is listed as being born on 01 January 1900. Amazingly she actually shares the same birthday with a very large number of girls in the W League playing around the country.
However worse than this when you consider that websites in the modern era are regarded as a clubs shop window are the following errors.
The Central Coast Mariners Youth team is not even featured, Melbourne Victory have only eight youth league players listed while Glory have seven plus three of their W League team forwards, Tabain, Jukic, Calautti and Kete. They are not alone in this, as The Jets have three of their Youth team forwards as being listed as Forwards for their W League side, Read, Bradbury and Talevski. So too do Sydney FC – which might explain how they achieved the result against Perth Glory – with Rufer, Figon and Powell listed.
Try and get any information on any of these players is nigh on impossible on most sites with no profiles or if there is one, no information.
As mentioned it may have been easier to have set this up in the off season rather than at the start of this season as happened. However as we all know this was tied into sponsorship dollars with Optus. But surely the fact that most of the websites are worse than the ones that they replaced this reflects poorly on Optus as well.
The sad thing is linked to this is the direction taken that in a lot of cases Media are to go to the web sites rather than receive press releases. Once they have visited a few times and not found the information they were after they will not return, so this has had and is having a huge detrimental effect on the game, and needs to be fixed as quickly as possible. Hopefully the IT department will be working overtime between Christmas and New Year to fix it.
