Beijing 2008: Get Your Online Olympics Fix Here

There are thousands of websites covering the Beijing Olympics, and many people will turn to the ones run by their favorite newspaper, TV channel or local Olympic association. In the UK, for example, we have the British Olympic Association's site for Team GB supporters. But over the course of the games tens or even hundreds of millions of people will visit the official Beijing Olympics site. Is it up to the job?

It should be. The first conference on the site's design was held in 2003, where the focus was on accessibility. The official site has to cope with several languages – for example English, French and Spanish, plus Arabic and Chinese. It has to cope with people who cannot see, or cannot hear, or have limited movement. Ideally, it should also be able to work with different hardware, operating systems and browsers including PCs, terminals and mobile phones.

This creates a lot of tension. For maximum accessibility, you can't beat plain text. However, web designers generally want their sites to be colorful and compelling, with lots of images and videos. Finding a balance involves lots of compromises.

A large part of the official site also has to be functional. Visitors want to know what's on where and when, and how to get to it. They want to know which athletes are competing for which teams. They want to know who won, whether the Olympic record was broken, and so on. This is not a trivial task when you have more than 10,000 competitors appearing in 37 venues.

Given the size of the challenge, Beijing 2008 doesn't do badly. It has a traditional menu on the left that covers the obvious categories such as news, schedules, athletes and venues. On a horizontal menue across the top are Olympic days, but no dates. The numbering runs from -2 to 16, with the opening ceremony (Friday) on day zero. Monday August 11 is therefore day 3, not day 4.

The site does have lots of videos. Most of these seem to be in Windows Media Video (wmv) format, which offers fast streaming with WMP9 or later; some are in Real Media format. Even before the games opened, I found videos were already having to stop for buffering. For Olympic video, YouTube may do better.

Beijing 2008 isn't attempting live video, but there is a box headed Olympic Video on the right hand side. Select your country and it pops up a new browser window that offers some coverage. The UK link leads to EurovisionSports.tv, while the USA links to NBC's nbcolympics.com.

There are some annoyances. First, I couldn't get the Olympics E-map to work at all. Second: you need to allow popups because Beijing 2008 frequently opens content in new browser windows. Third, it doesn't offer a "text larger" feature for Internet Explorer, and the default text is quite small.

It will be interesting to see if London 2012 can do better. There are only 1,479 days to go!