Posted by Cricinfo has changed. This is likely to be of at least some significance to you as someone who follows cricket online. What’s your opinion on the change?
ESPN
The first thing that struck us is that Cricinfo has been ‘acquired’ by ESPN. You have to say ‘acquired’. We don’t know why. We’re going to start ‘acquiring’ pints from the bar from now on.
Our thoughts on this acquisition are nothing more than that it’s a bit irritating that the foremost cricket website is owned by a US company. But such is life.
Typeface
Far and away the worst thing about the old Cricinfo was its typeface. It was too small for reading articles of any length and when you made it bigger, it looked hideous and was barely any more legible. The new typeface is far better.
Layout
The new homepage does the modern thing of having loads of small sections, each being a category of content. It’s okay. You can probably get to more stuff directly from the homepage, but it gives casual users a lot of screen to scan on first arrival.
The live scores bit’s better though, offering some sort of comprehensible hierarchy with international matches at the top. Previously, the live scores section always seemed to show KwaZulu Natal against Griqualand. Now you can minimise the KwaZulu Natal against Griqualand bit and just see scores you’re interested in.
Verdict
Overall, thumbs up, but it’s not the kind of thing we’re going to write a whole post about.
Eh? Oh.
The 1 thing that seems to be missing is from the archive results and series. For the moment atleast. In the old version u could view all the stats of the batsmen and bowlers from the previous series, not only the results are there.
Overall, looks good.
Btw, the ESPN acquisition took place 2 years ago. Even in the old side ESPN’s logo was apparent at the top. Now the whole branding seems to have kicked in.
ESPN’s acquisition: http://content.cricinfo.com/australia/content/current/story/297655.html
Has Amazon “acquired” KingCricket? Every time I try to read Q’s comment above, it gets covered up with an advert that I can’t move or remove.
You can still have the old homepage if you want:
http://static.cricinfo.com/homepage/index99.html
but I don’t know for how much longer. The stats guru thing looks better though. The one worry I had when the ESPN thing went through was that this bit would disappear / not get updated / not be quite as free.
So, on balance, I like it. However, we are CRICKET PEOPLE. Therefore – it’s new, so I hate it.
umm, ESPN owns cricinfo and that too since 2007, its not a recent development, though design is
I agree with your judgement, KC – not worth writing a whole post about.
I certainly wouldn’t write a comment in the discussion area if you were to write such a post.
Cricinfo was created by people in the US in the first place so the fact it has been taken over by a US makes no difference.
A bloke who happened to be working in the US is not the same as a US corporation.
Angry or amazed?