Town fans’ queries answered
Huddersfield Town’s official website, htafc.com, underwent a complete re-launch last week and has drawn lots of feedback – both positive and negative – from fans up and down the country.
As many fans will know, Huddersfield Town is part of the wider Football League Interactive deal, which means that Town has no say over which website provider is used to produce its official website. This is a long term legacy from the days of Town’s Administration in 2003 and will not conclude for a number of years.
Huddersfield Town’s Communications Department has been collating the most frequently asked question about the site and has put this guide together to educate fans as to the on-going development of the new site.
In many aspects the Club is directly powerless to affect the situation, but we are continuing to press the League and provider Sapient Nitro for responses and action.
With IT changes difficulties can always arise, but Huddersfield Town saw this coming and asked to be towards the end of the switchover so that many of the bugs could be ironed out in advance. Town supporters may not see this, but our end-user experience has actually been much better than that of the first clubs that launched in the first wave at the beginning of July.
The Huddersfield Town Communications Department is doing everything it can to make the experience better for Town fans, but for now we would strongly recommend everyone follows the Club on twitter for all the latest news - @htafcdotcom.
Site Slowness
All Football League club websites are currently in the process of re-launching and as a result the system is not as quick as it should be. The deadline for all site launches is 31 July, at which point the speed of service is expected to improve.
In the meantime Sapient Nitro has been increasing the server capacity to try and speed up the service to fans.
Mobile site
FLi’s tailor made mobile sites will be rolling out in September and are built on the Netbiscuits mobile publishing platform. They will have the same Web-Wap redirect process that was on the previous Perform websites.
Sapient had to put space between the website and mobile site rollouts due to development workload but also to minimise their risk as two launches rolling out concurrently, in their opinion, posed many risks.
Currently accessing the website takes you through to the full live site, which currently work well on some smartphones and not others. FLi has sent updates out on the FL Android and iPhone apps that resolved the issue around premium video. They are also chasing Apple on getting through the follow up to date to fix issues around news feeds.
Some fans still seeing the old site
Propagation to the new site should – we were told it would take 48 hours to sort worldwide. If you can’t see the new site, check with your administrator or internet service provider.
Pagination
FLI statement: “There is currently a significant defect with pagination where text and images are cut off and this is a big issue for FLi. At the moment Sapient have a number of potential solutions and they are currently testing them to see the appropriate solution. FLi will also be looking to improve the overall experience and will keep clubs posted on this as this is a matter of concern for everyone.”