IMG: Archiving by numbers

An absence of categorisation highlights a common failure to produce usable online archives.

The Site

IMG, the leading sports and celebrity representative agency, populates the News section of its website exclusively with media releases about its activities worldwide. The section’s home page is topped by the headline and opening sentence of the two most recent releases, each of which has a ‘more’ button for accessing the full release. Below is a table listing releases by headline and date in descending chronological order and which extends over seven web pages. Clicking on the headline brings up the release.

A simple navigation bar with page numbers and ‘back’/ ‘next’ buttons is provided to surf the content. Archiving goes back to January 2002, though there is no indication or explanation of this on any of the pages.

The Takeaway

News archiving is a near universal feature of organisational websites, but while everyone seems to understand that the web is the perfect medium for the job (it offers immediacy, unlimited storage and interactivity) relatively few have worked out how to provide a useable archive. Certainly IMG hasn’t.

By default visitors to its site get the latest releases, which makes sense from the ‘news’ perspective. But they are given no explanation of how the content is organised nor any meaningful categorisation to help them find anything. At the very least, content could be sub-divided into annual lists, both to indicate its chronological scope and to speed navigation. Division by subject headings would be even more useful – and would reflect the organisation of the separate Areas of Business section – though the limited size of the archive might make this less of a priority. As is stands, though, the archive is of little practical use to media professionals and unenticing to casual browsers – and thus a waste of an opportunity for IMG.

Worse, given the importance of publicity to its business, IMG’s failure to master the feature potentially detracts from its reputation.

First published on 27 September, 2005