AZ Gull
@SeagullsAcademy Threads: @bhafcacademy
A couple of years ago, the IT group that were given the contract for designing and maintaining the websites of the Football League clubs rolled out a disastrous "upgrade" that turned a series of perfectly serviceable, functional, easy-to-navigate websites into a bunch of ghastly, clunky, ad-laden, unuser-friendly abominations that has to go down as one of the most misguided improvement attempts in internet history. The roll-out occurred over a period of months; I remember a thread on here ridiculing Palace's ghastly monstrosity after they had gone live (even though we knew that it was only a matter of time before seagulls.co.uk suffered a similar fate). Albion were actually one of the last clubs to switch.
One of the great tragedies of this re-design was the loss of over 10 years of archive material. The old websites contained detailed first team match reports and statistics going back to season 2001-02, and, because of the standardised structure used for adding news content, it was possible to locate news stories going back to 2001. In one fell swoop this mass of league history was jettisoned. For a short while the old wesbites were still accessible (with a slightly modified web address), but eventually they were taken down.
And so I was very surprised yesterday when, as I was doing some browsing on the internet, I came across the following webpage - it is a profile page for the young Derby County defender Farrend Rawson. Why the surprise? Because it is the old style Derby County website, but it contains current information. The page address has a root structure that is new, but the rest of the address follows the old naming convention (each club had it's own 5 digit identifier; Derby County was 10270, Albion were 10433).
Wondering if this was some sort of fluke, with a little manipulation I tried to "find" the equivalent Albion website, and lo-and-behold - Seagulls.co.uk - the new (old) style homepage.
So, what does this mean? After two years is the Football League finally going to revert to the old style websites? I have no idea; but in celebration of the (perhaps only temporary) return of a full decade of Albion-related news and match reports, I give you the following:-
Jan 8 2005: Match report - Tottenham 2 - 1 Albion (FA Cup 3rd Round)
Sep 15 2008: Nathan Jones endears himself to Albion fans
May 18 2009: Tony Bloom becomes Chairman - whatever happened to him?
May 8 2010: Inigo Calderon is an ungrateful mercenary ba***rd
One of the great tragedies of this re-design was the loss of over 10 years of archive material. The old websites contained detailed first team match reports and statistics going back to season 2001-02, and, because of the standardised structure used for adding news content, it was possible to locate news stories going back to 2001. In one fell swoop this mass of league history was jettisoned. For a short while the old wesbites were still accessible (with a slightly modified web address), but eventually they were taken down.
And so I was very surprised yesterday when, as I was doing some browsing on the internet, I came across the following webpage - it is a profile page for the young Derby County defender Farrend Rawson. Why the surprise? Because it is the old style Derby County website, but it contains current information. The page address has a root structure that is new, but the rest of the address follows the old naming convention (each club had it's own 5 digit identifier; Derby County was 10270, Albion were 10433).
Wondering if this was some sort of fluke, with a little manipulation I tried to "find" the equivalent Albion website, and lo-and-behold - Seagulls.co.uk - the new (old) style homepage.
So, what does this mean? After two years is the Football League finally going to revert to the old style websites? I have no idea; but in celebration of the (perhaps only temporary) return of a full decade of Albion-related news and match reports, I give you the following:-
Jan 8 2005: Match report - Tottenham 2 - 1 Albion (FA Cup 3rd Round)
Sep 15 2008: Nathan Jones endears himself to Albion fans
May 18 2009: Tony Bloom becomes Chairman - whatever happened to him?
May 8 2010: Inigo Calderon is an ungrateful mercenary ba***rd
