31 March 2008
Websites of IPL Teams
Posted by Aditya under: Cricket; Indian Premier League .
I have been looking at websites of IPL franchises more out of curiosity, in terms of their awareness of the online market, than for just cricket related information. At the time of writing, Mumbai Indians, and Punjab Kings didn’t have websites. I will update this page if I do find websites of the remaining teams. I have brief reviews based on my first impressions of these sites, but I will, perhaps, write a more detailed post on what I think of the overall picture later.
These are the websites of the other teams though:
Rajasthan Royals They have a decent website which is functional at the moment with scope for future expansion into merchandising and tapping the mobile market. A decent website that looks upon Shane Warne as their mascot.
Bangalore Royal Challengers I find Vijay Mallya’s face at the splash screen a little creepy. Why can’t he stay at the background for once? Even the Knightriders don’t have SRK in their splash screen. Again, a decent enough site that looks a little colourful, but I don’t like the Red and Yellow combination.
Kolkata Knight Riders SRK seems to have a good idea of the market pulse. If their website is any judge, he’s got things right and seems very serious about this venture. He will dream big no doubt. (Full disclosure: I’m not a big fan of SRK’s acting) His website has a rather decent theme song too. I however, highly doubt if his heavy flash oriented web site would allow low bandwidth sites to get full value, but props to his tech staff. Great Bong had his take on Kolkata Knight Riders but it looked like he was trying hard to sound funny, which is rather quite unlike GB.
Delhi Daredevils They just have a splash screen with some jarring 5 second electric guitar riff, on loop.
Deccan Chargers An average website, but I don’t get why these IPL teams find the need to seek inspiration from American teams (in this case, the San Diego Chargers). The PHL had better team names. Deccan Chargers also think they are ‘The Unstoppables’. We’ll see how true that is. Their press releases also include a headline ‘DC unleashes war cry’. Even being owned by an English Daily cannot stop such gems from being published on websites.
Chennai Super Kings I like their site. Really love it. It eschews the flash-heavy nature of Kolkata Knight Riders while not having your run of the mill design. Unlike Bangalore, where the ego-maniacal Vijay Mallya sticks his head in the splash screen, they have Dhoni at the forefront; the intentions are consistent with what they had to say during the auction, that Dhoni is their most important player, given his popularity and brand value, apart from being the captain of the national one-day (and T20) side.
It’s a shame that Mumbai doesn’t even have a website. So much for being owned by RIL. And Punjab Kings? Apparently Preity Zinta isn’t learning much from SRK’s marketing blitz.
Update: Kings XI Punjab now have a website, and so do Mumbai Indians.
And finally, a word on the official IPL website: it’s a disgrace. So much money and they couldn’t come up with staff who could update the site beyond their latest update, which is dated to 20th of February. But more on that later.
3 Comments so far...
Robin Says:
1 April 2008 at 4:57 am.
Punjab website is up now.. check it out at
http://www.kingsxipunjab.com/
Aditya Says:
1 April 2008 at 10:20 am.
Thanks for the link! I’ll update it.
IPL Promotion Strategies through Internet | aditya ramgopal dot com Says:
8 April 2008 at 1:09 am.
[...] promised, in an earlier post, that I would give a detailed overview of the IPL from an internet marketing standpoint. In that [...]
