Just Arsenal News

I have a football website, as you can see, and i get to look at many similar websites every single day, you could not imagine exactly how many there are in the world. I have been doing this for a few months now and i am still finding new ones every day.

But sometimes, one stands out and i take an extra bit of notice, and 11gunners.com fits that bill.

11Gunners.com is a site purely focused on news and views about the English Premiership side Arsenal, and is taking advantage of the massive untapped resource of Arsenal fans in India.

Arsenal themselves have been investing in young Indian players for quite some time, in a collaboration with Tata Tea. They have set up youth tournaments in various parts of the country and they organize Soccer Schools and training camps. Arsenal even send coachs to India, and also have the very best young Indian players over to London for extra instruction, and to represent their country in the Arsenal International Soccer Festival which is held every year in London. This has contributed to the fact Arsenal’s support is growing in this vast continent.

But back to the 11Gunners! This is an upcoming Football Enterprise set up by six students called Stepover Inc, the first of its kind in India. They are also running sites for Chelsea, Barcelona and Man Utd, and planning to introduce sites for Madrid, AC Milan and Liverpool as well in the near future. The Arsenal site has only been going since the 1st of August 2009, but you wouldn’t think it was new from looking at it. The lads from Stepover Inc. are certainly ambitious for such a young company!

The website itself is full of interesting and varied articles, and most importantly http://11gunners.com is updated regularly. The site can be a little loud with all its bright pics and flash gadgets, but i suppose that is to be expected from computer-savvy students, but you can see they are trying to make it as interesting as possible for the visitor.

I’m not keen on the use of google-ads under the headline, as it obscures the story when you first click on it, which means that you have to scroll down to find out where the actual story is! I’m more in favour of ads being in sidebars where you can pick and choose if you read them or not, but hey, I’m picky!

I do like the idea of their “Predict n win” competition, which adds to the audience participation and gives you a chance to pit your wits against the world by predicting the Premiership scores each week. And you could even win an Arsenal shirt at the end of it!

But the most important part of any website is the content, and 11gunners provides varied and interesting articles of recent news, mixed with memories of the good old days, so, in my opinion, it is definitely worth a visit if you are an Arsenal fan. Try it and see!

(This article was written for justarsenal.com and justwebsitereviews.com)