Katusha : Coming to the front

A cycling sponsor gets its profiles in gear.

The Site

Katusha, the ‘Russian global cycling project’, makes a compact display of team and management profiles that brings individuals to the fore.

Katusha provides a dedicated website as part of its sponsorship of a professional road race cycling team. Profiles of all its 27 cyclists and 12 senior members of the management and back-up team are viewable on a single Team page.

Accessed direct from the primary menu the page is topped by a full-width picture banner with a group photograph of the cyclists which, after opening, runs through a sequence of action shots. Ranged below the banner are sets of thumbnail portraits; first, of the cyclists, then the Management, Sport directors and Press agents. These are arranged 10 to a line across the page and each is captioned with the name of the individual. Clicking a thumbnail greys out the page and launches an in-page display screen showing a three-quarter-length cut-out portrait and biographical and career details; click an ‘X’ button to close the display and refresh the page.

The Takeaway

Katusha may be struggling to stand out from the bunch on the course but it is ahead of most of the corporate field in showing off its team members. Its display leaves behind many of the frustrations of more conventional biography features: long vertical displays that require extensive scrolling simply to see all those covered; yo-yo clicking between menus and content to browse multiple entries; and unannounced jumps to other sections of the site where the biographies are located.

The generously-spaced display and main banner here mean some scrolling is still required to reveal the full extent of the gallery but thereafter the slightly off-track choice of image style and a little bit of web technology go a long way to bringing an engaging and user-friendly immediacy to the feature.

First published on 14 July, 2009