Another day, another World Cup site. Actually, this is a very good one from Australia’s Big Pond, a major ISP down under which is owned by the Australian telecom giant, Telstra. Big Pond has an attractive mobile home page, http://wap.telstra.com/wap/ although much of the content is links to external sites like CNN, Yahoo, etc. For the World Cup, Big Pond has commissioned Sportall to produce an original mobile site. On the right device, it’s very attractive mobile web design and contains first rate content as well. The qualification is because the site locks content into a fixed size div. The div width is either 166 or 176px depending on some sort of browser detection. There are also header and footer images the same width as the div. At least those were the only sizes I got after throwing a dozen or so user agents at it. I don’t see the point of offering only two sizes that are so close together. However as long as your phone has a browser with a screen at least 166px wide or one that can resize images on the fly the site should look great.

There’s really a lot of information on this site, more than any of the other World Cup sites I’ve seen so far. For each of the 32 teams there’s a roster of players, schedule of matches, a detailed team profile and one or more pieces about the team’s recent matches. For the Australian team, the Socceroos, there is not surprisingly much more – over 20 stories about the team’s chances, top players, which opponents they are worried about etc. There are also feature articles on the front page previewing Saturday’s opening matches and approximately 20 additional general World Cup articles.

Great site, check it out! I’ve added it to the World Cup page on yeswap.com. Go to yeswap.com on your mobile phone and follow the menu to Sports/World Cup/Big Pond.

Big Pond World Cup: xhtml
Content:  Usability: