Its implementation also coincided with a new wave of success on the pitch. A fluke? Probably. Though as United’s Head of Online Mark Hargreaves tells Football Business, in new media terms the club has always been a class apart, and is aiming to drive forward once more with the potential rewards from e-commerce greater than ever before.

Well, clearly from an online perspective you are literally talking to the world. Manchester United have an estimated 75 million fans globally, and from a new media point of view we are achieving something like 3 million unique users per month. These are colossal numbers, and in the scheme of what they enable us to achieve – in terms of branding, information and commerce, the internet is the most significant communication tool that we have ever had at our disposal. That’s why we had to get our relaunch right.

It follows logically that, unlike on the pitch, our rivals in this market aren’t the likes of Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal, and we make a conscious effort to take on board ideas from other Premiership clubs, often coming together a couple of times a year to discuss our approach and share information. Our biggest threats are the other media organisations – the BBC, Sky etc. All coverage, be that online, via newspapers or on the television can be taken either as a threat or an enhancement, and I honestly think it works both ways. Speculation leads people to check the ManUtd.com website and we pride ourselves on comprehensive and authoritative news coverage, so even when news sources take stories from us they’ll generally credit the official website, so that’s self-perpetuating in many respects.

Certainly in style and approach though, we have to aspire to be alongside those sources as they hold the biggest competitive threat to traffic, so we’ll see what they’re doing, and attempt to emulate and better it. The BBC’s navigation, for example, is fantastic, so why try and reinvent something when it is being done clinically elsewhere and has been shown to work? I think the internet differs in that respect from most other industries, because it is still relatively new and there is still a large amount we can respectfully learn from others.

We paid a lot of attention to the style guides for the relaunch. Many club websites utilise the concept of a splash page which houses one big ad on the front of the site. We wanted to get away from that, offering a standardised frontpage that still allows users direct access to what is underneath. We have achieved that by providing quick links which, from a backend perspective, are very easily updatable at source. Users are also spared the problems associated with trying to load a homepage that contains many different points and components.

It is often an assumption that websites will be designed with ease of content in mind, but the reality can be different, so from that point of view it was essential that the news items and other pieces of information were all movable and instantly updatable should the need arise.

The site itself showcases a smart MPU (multi-purpose unit) area that rotates with a feature called ‘On this day in history’, which speaks for itself. That gets a tenminute slot which is commercially countered with an advertising piece of similar timing, so we’re maintaining equal principles of information and promotion. Then there is a single-play flash player which serves to promote the MUTV channel.

One of our key goals was to create a constant feeling of movement on the site, rather than something static that just utilises a RealPlayer program. To that end, the rotations that we use are in principle futuristic, even though in form we are only working with the current technologies that we have available to us.

We tried to make sure that the navigation was easy, so implemented an expandable menu from which users can pull up sub-options. Research and consultation with our web design partner, Lightmaker, showed us that centring information in the middle of the page and keeping the navigation as consistent as possible makes the site much easier to use. In the past we have used navigation along the top, though found that with a horizontal structure there are a finite number of characters available to you. Then, as the site expands over time it becomes troublesome, and potentially restrictive for new content or commercial deals which, if they are added, are commonly replacing something else that has found itself removed – in effect, content substitution as opposed to enhancement, something which is not forward-thinking. This newer method enables the simple creation of another sub-section and the potential use of the entire length of the page.

I’d say we attempted that as much as was possible. You can’t allow some traditional aspects to cloud your pursuit of the product you set out to achieve, this is technology after all. For example, the previous site featured white text on a red background – colours that are obviously reflective of the club’s. But for usability and an accessibility point of view we couldn’t maintain them, because visually it’s quite difficult to read white text on a red background. The easiest set-up is black text on a white background, and we have allowed ourselves to construct and operate this by the use of shirt colours on the site, effectively inviting users to select their own skins, and from that customise the way they want to see the site. A simple feature for us, but on a consumer level, empowering and offering them their own creative branch with which they feel they have an individual and unique place within the United online brand.

I suppose like everybody else we are just keeping a close eye on developments in that respect. One of the things we will seek to do over the next few months is to hook up with fans who wish to write blogs for the site. We do already run a ‘Fanzone’ area, and through that we are effectively attempting to ring-fence fantype content, with the freedom for that content to be a little more edgy. It has to come though with the strict understanding though that it is external content and not the voice of the club, so you could say we are trying to go down that route.

We are certainly not the only club to find themselves hesitating on moving further into this area. It is a situation that new media at this level is confronting, because as much as we’d like to encourage the uploading of video and messages, and at the same time offer supporters much more freedom and expression, this type of content implies a lot of vetting, policing, approving and monitoring, so it remains very much a double-edged sword.

We have consulted with other companies (inside and outside the game) who have trialled this and have listened to their experiences, but the reality is that at the end of the day every football fan is a manager, and every football fan has their own views about team selection, who is playing well, who the club should sign, and so on. Whatever the permutations are, everyone has a view, but the reality is that there is only one man who is ever right.