Suddenly, and finally, The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has a fresh and new look to it. A new President, a newish set of office colleagues and a fresher website — www.bcci.tv! The
richest board in the world cricket, the board of control for cricket in India, has finally launched its own website amidst hue and cry over their launch, since a “few days”.
www.bcci.tv, The BCCI website, claims to offer the Indian Cricket Fans streaming video, mobile content, live scorecards, player’s profiles, statistics, interviews and interestingly, “Fan Interaction”( I didn't see it on their site though). Produced and maintained by Global Cricket Ventures, the BCCI website was launched after Nagpur lawyer Mr Shashank Manohar took the aisle from Mr. Sharad Pawar, as the new president. The company also manages the official site for IPL, www.iplt20.com, has signed a ten year old agreement with BCCI.
The transformation from the old look BCCI Website definitely looks a good one. During the period of Oct, 2006- Feb 2008, they didn’t have much to offer, but now they seem to have done their home work, before launching its site. To see, how it looked earlier, click the web archive site for its history. The magic word “BETA” also makes it further interesting about their next set of actions and plans. Would be worth watching them out! Many bloggers would be covering them for good findings, here’s something not so good from Subhangi, straight from her heart! 
A few Ugly Findings!
- Chakdecricket,Chakdecricket,Chakdecricket: The Shahrukh Khan Starrer must have played a vital role in the site’s conceptualization. In their Meta tags, they have mentioned Chak De Cricket (Not India, Sorry Pepsi!) not once, but thrice. I wonder what make them promote this as a keyword, if they have tried to include that. Any guesses anyone?
- Size of Headlines and the featured Videos Section: The overall size looks very overwhelming to the eyes. They could have done better by keeping them smaller, both from the users point of view and also to assist in fast loading of the page.
- 404 Errors: If you encounter any 404 error on this site, you come across more links that are having 404, strange testing there by those guys! If I am here at http://www.bcci.tv/test/about-bcci.html, I still don’t find any valid links to browse to their site. No wonders now, why the “Beta’ word is there.
- Content: The content of the site looks very outdated, though I would assume they would get it right once the important series between India and Australia kicks off.
- Confusing URLs: Some of the Urls have standard words, while some of them have digits all along them. See videos for reference. Some even go to the extent of having a 1 appended at the end of the URLs as well, see photo1, and not photos.html.
- Redirection: If I remove the 1 from http://www.bcci.tv/scores1.html, I would expect it to show me some 404 error, but it gets redirected to their iplt20 site.
 This was a big surprise to me. - Empty Content: If I click the http://www.bcci.tv/scores1.html, I see the following, no content?
- Many More…
It is actually quite an informative website, if one has an interest in State cricket associations and the like. But there are few things they could have done without. Mr. Pawar said "I'm happy that this alliance between Global Cricket Ventures and the BCCI will further significantly enrich the user experience for the Indian cricket fans around the world with a direct window to the on-field action through next generation technologies", while "I'm certain the forthcoming India-Australia series itself will generate a lot of traffic to the BCCI website," was added by Satyajit Swaminathan, president of GCV.
Better late than never! It has been a real surprise that the richest board got its website so late, and the ICC still doesn’t have it! I wonder what their plans are! I wish them all the best though. I could have gone to a long extent, but I need to blog on more…So I drop down here. May be I can continue it after the period Beta turns Alpha. Let’s See.
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