Northcliffe Media has relaunched four of the specialist sports sites in its North division as the new soccer season gets under way.

The four sites - sporthull.co.uk, sportgrimsby.co.uk, sportscunny.co.uk and sportsecho.co.uk - cover the respective patches of the Hull Daily Mail, Grimsby Telegraph, Scunthorpe Telegraph and Lincolnshire Echo.

Originally set up in 2007, they have now been relaunched with a new look as well as several new features and functionality.

New features on the sporthull.co.uk site include a 'Big Match Live' service for all Hull City's games, which will provide running commentary and interaction with users.

It will also include an aggregation service providing Hull City news from around the web, as the club begins its second season in the Premiership.

Hull Daily Mail editor John Meehan, who is also Northcliffe's regional editorial director for the North-East, said: "All of these new features enhance the service we give to web users and further differentiate our digital offering from our in-depth and analytical sports coverage in the paper. We will also use the sports sites to promote our print-only sports content."

Lincolnshire Echo sports editor John Pakey added: "Since we launched a specialist sports site in 2007 we have had encouraging feedback and growth in users and page views. The transfer over to the new site has been met with positive feedback from users."

The four sites were previously hosted on a platform created by Hull-based web development company Finesse. The sites have now migrated to Northcliffe's group-standard web publishing platform, which hosts the four papers' companion news websites.

In June, the sporthull.co.uk site recorded 84,000 unique visitors and more than 1m page views.