England and Wales Cricket Board
We are particularly proud of the ECB cricket site as it draws on almost all of our skills: design, scalable hosting, content management, ecommerce, membership, accessibility and web publishing.
Our association with cricket goes back to 1997 when the ECB combined with the MCC to launch www.lords.org as a major portal for cricket. We designed this site and provided content management with the very first version of OTHERobjects CMS, our content management software.
During the late 90's dotcom boom (and bust) the ECB separated to join one of the emerging cricket sites. But as stock markets fell they recognised the importance of controlling their own Internet presence and after a highly competitive tender process, the OTHER media won the site back.
The new ECB cricket site www.ecb.co.uk was launched after a eight week design and build project by the OTHER media.
It is a completely new site with live scores, news and features as well as a new members area. Mobile, printable and text only versions of the site have been created to make the site accessible to all.
It is being controlled by a brand new version of our content management system OTHERobjects CMS. The new version of OTHER objects provides full contextual editing as well as the flexible management of images, news, results, data and forthcoming video.
The site receives live news and results feeds from PA Sport and demonstrates how OTHERobjects CMS can be used to run a major publishing venture from multiple locations with a large team of reporters and photographers.
Since relaunch in 2004 we have added ecommerce and membership functionality, provided mailorder functionality behind the scenes and further freshened up the site with another new design during the 2005 cricket season.
Running this sort of site is also about managing the variation in traffic that occurs during critical matches. No match could have better illustrated this than during the Ashes Final last summer. OTHERobjects CMS and the site itself have both been designed to be fully scalable and as the intensity of play on the pitch developed and the audience built we were able to dynamically add more bandwidth and processor power to ensure that the site remained responsive and available.
