European Union On-Line

In this analysis we evaluate the europa.eu website.

This is a huge portal, providing content in more than 20 languages.
It's really hard to say the approach that was taken to build the website. Although most of the pages are htm or html, we cannot say that it is a static website based only on the file extension. The website uses the same hierarchy to all available languages, changing only the file suffix:

Agriculture:

http://europa.eu/pol/agr/index_en.htm
http://europa.eu/pol/agr/index_fr.htm
http://europa.eu/pol/agr/index_es.htm

Energy:

http://europa.eu/pol/ener/index_en.htm
http://europa.eu/pol/ener/index_fr.htm
http://europa.eu/pol/ener/index_es.htm

There is a dropdown menu that allows to change the language, and once the language has changed we are kept in the same section of the website. If a section is not available in the current language links are shown to the content in the available languages:

All metadata is properly set what definitely must help the website in terms of search engine optimization. It could take advantage of friendly and localized urls, but implementing that could be hard or even impossible since they don't use a multilingual content management architecture.

It's a really well done website, at least in terms of multilingual content. Not pretty but effectively functional and informative.