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Always Elvis (Official German Fanclub website)

December 20, 1999 | Other
This week we take a look at an "official" (endorsed by Graceland that is) Elvis Presley Website, the website of the Elvis Presley Gesellschaft E.V. This site is in German.

Design

The design of the entry page is very very loud, because of all the animated pictures and animated background, we counted close to ten animated images on this page. It seems they like animated pictures in Germany because we also counted seven of them on the first real page. But enough on that subject.

This site loses one of it's possible stars right at the beginning of their review because it's impossible to turn of the midi-files which are playing on every page. Listening to a CD or MP3 while browsing this site is impossible since you'll hear both your own, and this website's audio in a unwanted mix. We mention the possibility of an on/off button for audio quite often since we believe the visitor of an website should have a choice looking at the site with or without music. Certainly since every page has it's own midi-file which starts the midi-player even though you turned the sound to the zero level ...

When we take a closer look at the design we see it looks good on a 800x600 resolution, but when viewed at a higher resolution the lay-out has some errors. Images which should be underneath each other are shown next to each other. Another error in the images is that some of them are taken from other websites and are edited a bit, but not enough, the background of the site and the image are different, which makes it look like the image isn't finished, or just torn out of a book. But there's a nice balance between information (text) and images, which makes it nice to scroll down the pages even when you don't understand much of the content.

All pages have the same structure, long pages with a lot of content, and the same lay-out structure but other (background) images. navigation is pretty easy, there's a main-page where you start and when you follow one of the menu-items you can get back to the main page by use of the "zuruck"-button (back-button in English).

We can summon this part of the review up with the conclusion that the lay-out is noisy (because of the animations) but consequently designed and easy to navigate.

Rating: 8/10

Content

What can we say about the content of this site, it's a basic Elvis information site. It has all the stuff you need or might want to know about the man and his work.. We couldn't find any information about Elvis in Germany, a missed chance we think since that's the one country outside the U.S.A. where Elvis spend quite some time. (for those who don't know this: during his army years he was stationed in Germany where he met Priscilla). The news-page hasn't been updated in a while, that's a pity. But the site has a nice item for the German fans / fanclub-members, there's a bulletin board to place an add. Further there's nothing really special on this site.

A real beauty is the links page. This page is divided in several sections, important websites, websites in the German language, the best international sites, Fan clubs, collectors sites and so on. Each site has a short description of it's content so you know what you get when you follow a link.

Rating: 6/10

Advise

Besides the little tips we gave regarding the images and the BIG one regarding the midi-files, there aren't that many remarks we can make here. The site is a real fanclubsite, with basic content. It might be nice to add an international page to the site for international visitors. With some detailed information on Elvis in Germany on this site, the site could really contribute something internationally, because this is the site on the WWW where you would expect to find this specific information.

We have a higher score on design and a lower on content with a one star award as the result.