BallinEurope.com’s public service task, i.e. cataloguing the major team websites in Europe continues today with a rundown of official websites from teams confirmed for Euroleague Group B, listed in order of English-language coverage.* For those who missed it, the BallinEurope take on Euroleague Group A can be found here.
To Partizan Belgrade: Wow. All Euroleague-employed webmasters and production designers should drop everything and take a look at what Partizan is doing. The site already looks good, but the amount of English-language stuff is admirable and KKPartizan.rs even includes an awesome reproduction of Partizan’s excellent bilingual media guide — actually more like an American-style team yearbook.
Lots of moving graphics, text, and ads on the homepage makes the Partizan page a tad busy, but who cares? A nice effort done up by the Serbians here.
Though Lietuvos Rytas may not have much up in terms of English-language material, when compared with their Lithuanian rivals Zalgiris Kaunas, the L. Rytas folks look like positive polyglots. Sure, there isn’t much in English, but LRytas.lt is easy to navigate and does contain three photos of the “dance team.”
The first thought upon entering the Olympiacos Piraeus homepage? “Whoa, this is red. Really, really red.” The official team color is well-used and used well at Olympiacos.org, a nice enough looking site. And the general information and histories about the Olympiacos Piraeus sports club are quite good
More than slightly maddening, however, was the disappointing number of links in the basketball section leading to gloomy – though still really, really red – pages marked THIS PAGE NOT AVAILABLE. The English-language news consists mostly of game wrap-ups.
Efes Pilsen Istanbul is fairly typical in English-language content while being heavy on the pictures. Pictures (though sometimes merely a list of names) grace the Efesbasket.org pages for each of Instanbul’s many men’s, women’s and youth teams. Unfortunately, there’s little more. While it’s nice to see the “Efes Girls” get such prominence on the homepage, but click the link and you get this. Yes, that’s it.
Unicaja has a sharp-looking white-and-green themed website, but sorry, nada in ingles. The miraculous Babelfish website might be very useful here, though sometimes something does get lost in translation. On the origin of his name, Taquan “The Scoring Machine” Dean tells us through a translator then through Babelfish that “My father is Muslim and chose a name that means Knowledge of God. It is truth that is not very current but is tuna.”
Babelfish, eh?
* Caveat: This is not to say that any team is indebted to run English-language material and certainly no implication that websites without English are inferior. It’s simply just that the lingua franca of BallinEurope.com is, well, English.
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