Ten years and counting

Our site has become a fantastic resource, as good as any cricket website in the world HKCA Chairman's Report, 2001

On 1st September 2007, the HKCA website, hosted by Cricinfo, will mark its 10th birthday. Conceived in 1997 by KCC's Travis Pittman in conjunction with then HKCA General Manager, Mark Burns, the website has grown over the years to become a valuable resource of Hong Kong cricket played during the mid and late 1990's and the early 21st century.

The website started out providing a simple summary of local cricket action in Hong Kong when the internet as we know it was in its infancy. Each year more and more detail was added to the website and today you can find detailed analysis of fixtures, results, averages and statistics, photos and player profiles for all men's and women's cricket. All international matches are covered in detail with scorecards, match reports and photos provided, where possible. All seasons since 1996-97 have been comprehensively chronicled and details from earlier seasons continue to be added as and when the information becomes available.

The site now boasts well over 1500 individual pages of information with approximately 250 new pages being added each season. This number does not include the player profiles and photographs that also being added regularly.

In 2001, then HKCA Chairman Mike Walsh stated in his annual report to members "...our site has become a fantastic resource, as good as any cricket website in the world." The quality of the website was also recognised by the ICC when it received the 'Best Cricket Promotional Program 2004 - Asia' at the ICC Development Awards.

Travis Pittman updates the HKCA website from Darwin while interested Hong Kong players look on. © HKCA

Travis continues to maintain the website as the HKCA webmaster and he promises to keep improving the website. "Each year I try to bring something new to the website. Last year I introduced the photo galleries and brought the look and feel of the site into line with the design standards set by Cricinfo" he says. "This year I joined the Hong Kong team on its tour to Darwin. That allowed me to provide a greater level of coverage than ever before. It was great fun being involved with the tour and I'm sure everyone appreciated the extra coverage."

The HKCA website continues to be hosted by Cricinfo, the world's largest cricket website. As Cricinfo has grown its own website and systems (the site is now owned by ESPN) and introduced new technologies, these have also been reflected in the HKCA website design. "All the match reports and stories are now created using Cricinfo's Content Management System (CMS). This allows the stories to be readily linked to multiple pages and sites and referenced on headlines etc.," says Travis. He adds, "This year, Cricinfo have introduced the capability to receive user comments on stories posted. It'll be interesting to read some of the feedback."

Travis also created and maintained the websites for the Hong Kong International Cricket Sixes in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006.