Around the World (Wide Web) for the Olympics

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Posted on August 5, 2008 under Design Galleries

The 2008 Summer Olympics begin this Friday in Beijing, China. Over 10,000 athletes from 205 countries will be participating in these games – which is an incredible number to me, since I didn’t even know there were 205 countries in the world. (I’ll even give you bonus points if you know the number of countries that participated at the very first modern Olympics.)

It will be an incredible sight to see the delegations from all of those nations marching in during the Opening Ceremonies. So with that in mind, here is my own “parade of nations” – only in this case, my parade consists of national Olympic team websites. The “parade” starts with the official Olympic websites, both of these games and of the movement.

I was curious to see how varied these website designs could be, and I wasn’t disappointed. I was pleasantly surprised by some (Brazil’s and Australia’s websites rock), but I found myself disappointed in others (Canada’s and Great Britain’s definitely leave something to be desired).

So take a look through the list below, and maybe you’ll be as interested as I am at how similar and different these websites can be – which says a lot about how universal some aspects of communication really are.

Official Olympic Website