Original Project: Cthul-B-Que, on Invisible City Games
Agency: Loodo
Year: 2009

Website: http://www.loodo.com.br
Agency: Freelance / Personal Project
Year: 2008

I support Botafogo. I could complain about lots of problems nowadays, as the team is in one of the last positions in the championship, and little work seems to be in progress by its president and leaders. But this is a web designer’s blog, and I thought that discussing and talking about Botafogo’s website layout and information architecture would be the best way I could help. But even if you don’t support the same team as I do, you can keep on reading: When it comes to online presence, almost every single team on Brazil’s premier league seems to be scoring bad.

I went through the 20 team’s websites looking primarily for these features: RSS Feeds, selling online tickets, interactivity (social media), optimal screen resolution and a CSS based design. And not even a single website have all of them.

RSS Feeds

When you go to your favorite team’s website, you should expect to read all the latest news related to it. Nowadays, it’s easier and simpler to have those news aggregated to your favorite RSS reader through a feed. But, to my surprise, less than a half of the visited websites had a RSS feed available through the homepage. actually, few of them have at least fresh news!

I do understand that gathering journalists and webwritters isn’t as easy as it sounds, it IS somewhat simple to at least display news from different sources on a website. Many unofficial sites and blogs already do this. Botafogo website unfortunately doesn’t have a RSS feed and, by the time I am writting this post, neither one of the last 5 news on globoesporte.com are yet noticed on the official site.

Selling Online Tickets

Buying tickets online is not an easy task: Not only for the soccer club’s fault, but mainly because the stadiums here also give very little support (or no support at all) to this selling method. Anyone of the sites visited sells tickets on its own. When they do sell tickets, they redirect to another site (usually Ingresso Rápido or Visa’s Futebol Card) where you can buy using your credit card number.

Here, Botafogo’s website has an awful flaw: Although you can buy tickets from Futebolcard for the matches, there isn’t any link or banner on the homepage pointing to it. People who are unaware of this option probably will remain that way.

Interactivity

Almost every team now have an official Twitter account, and thus, Twitter is largely the most used interactivity channel, winning over official blogs, forums and You Tube channels.

But is not that good. Almost every Twitter account is actually a disguised-RSS service, posting only the headline of the news featured on the website. There’s little or any interactivity with the supporters. And what’s the good of social media if it’s not social at all? When it comes to blogging, things get a little better: When the clubs have a blog, they at least allow comments on it. The only official link to an You Tube account (at least from those listed on the websites’ homepages) does not link to a official channel, though.

A funny fact involving twitter, is that both Atlético Mineiro and Internacional have changed the Twitter logo’s color, in order to not feature anything blue (their archirival’s color) in their homepage. But they have to accept the official logo in their Twitter pages.

Botafogo, again, while does have a Twitter account also don’t feature it in its homepage.

Optimal Screen Resolution

While widescreen and LCD monitors are becoming cheaper and larger every day, half of the websites visited (and Botafogo is one of those) still are designed to fit in a 800 pixel-wide resolution. Besides making the design look old, these narrow formats usually comes along with a more confusing layout, as lots of information are structured in a small space. No site have an adaptative or liquid layout, and few of them have a background optimized to look good in large screens (1650 pixels+).

CSS-Based Design

To my surprise, almost half of the visited sites still used tables as the core of their html. And it gets worse when you see that many of them have been redesigned in the last two years, when tableless CSS designs were largely used.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, Botafogo’s website is one of the worst designed websites when analysing from these aspects: Does not have an RSS feed; although the club does have a Twitter account and online selling capacity, its Homepage doesn’t feature this anywhere; it’s still designed in tables and for a 800 pixiel wide resolution. I am not here to blame any designer’s job, as I don’t have idea of how this work was conducted and agreed. But I think that creating a solid image over the Internet is very important to any club and to their supporters.

Anyway, they should not wait for a new complete redesign to start changing this problems: Adding a new banner informing about Twitter and the online ticktes can not be the best solution, but it will be better than not showing anything. After that, they could start looking after Avai’s and Internacional’s websites: They, even having some big problems, are the best online examples of the 20 teams. And then start think bigger: Today, internet can be a great solution for gathering the crowd and, why not, some income – as you understand better who are your supporters and what they want.

Website: http://www.petrobras.com.br
Agency: Sirius Interativa
Year: 2007