VANOC commissioned an awesome website for this historic event. Everything from the art to the technology is extremely well done. Here’s quick roundup of the noteworthy stuff.
Great layout, great design: The content organization and navigation is intuitive: find the sport, scores, venue, read the news, etc. It appears cluttered, but it’s got a lot to do! But more fun is the design. Notice the modern lineart used in the large backgrounds (peaking out the right side of the content) and through the header. The sport featured is random on the home page, and sport-specific on the sport portals. This original art is seen all throughout graphics at the venues and in associated advertising. Watch for it on the boards in the hockey and curling highlights we’ll be seeing for some time.
Loads of content: Each sport has a portal with all sorts of information on the sport and its representation at these games. The site also includes athlete profiles, including the large number of team sport athletes.
Language: The site is fully bilingual — navigation, graphics, all content — with quality language flipping features. This is expected, obligatory. The value for me is in how well the language flipping works for keeping you exactly in the context you are, as you flip the language and read on.
Online Store: The e-store has its own template. It’s an interesting choice to not brand it seamless with the rest of the site, but it’s attractive nonetheless. The e-store has pretty basic features and it works quite well for what it does.
Video: The site does not have the live and archived video that the networks offer. It’s well understood why this is and I’m glad they didn’t go for it. They instead provide handy links to where you can watch video produced for and local to your corner of the world. It does have a media centre however that sports the vignettes, and other interest and culture pieces. Most of the videos are actually embedded YouTube videos.
And last, but not least: Google’s on board. Search “Olympics” or “medal count” during the games and Google gives you the top three countries’ performance, followed by handy links into the site.
PS. ‘Powered by Bell’ could very well in this case mean developed by Bell. Bell uses sub contractors for certain production; can anyone tell me what firm led the production of this web site? Bell might refocus some of that energy on itself after the games and stop trying to be Apple’s design 
