In a different league

It's the start of summer and most fans assume that football and rugby clubs are all off to the beach. However it is usually a busy time getting things ready for the new season.

This year, we have one club that doesn't finish playing until the autumn: Superleague team Harlequins RL. Harlequins RL were formerly known as London Broncos but merged with NEC Harlequins at the end of last year.

The new Quins site has to cope with both rugby union AND rugby league. This caused us a few headaches as Quins wanted the union and league parts of the site to be inclusive and to encourage supporters from both disciplines of rugby to find out how the other half lives.

From a technical standpoint we had to ensure that the match reports coped with 15 players and 6/7 subs for union and 13 players and 4 subs for league. Different scoring/tables also had to be addressed and the fact that union refer to the 2006/2007 season whereas league refers to the current season as 2006.

The site has now been live since February 2006 and has been welcomed by virtually all concerned. Quins now have a growing body of fans with season tickets for both league and union and the traffic on the site has gone up to a greater figure than the old NEC Harlequins and London Broncos sites combined.