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Elvis Information Network

September 20, 1999 | Other
Visiting the Elvis Information Network (EIN) you can be surprised and ask yourself, "Am I on the right site?". But no, they changed the lay-out once again! We almost had our review ready when we were surprised by David Troedson, the webmaster: he had redesigned his website.... once again.

Design:


We think the new lay-out looks great, round forms in the square world of Internet make a site look really different. The clear design is an improvement on the background he used last month.
Although the menu-selection box at the top of the page isn't our favourite navigation system, it works fine in general. One of the minors of this navigationsystem is it doesn't work to well with mouse's with a scrolling wheel. When you turn the wheel in order to scroll through the text, the menu is changing unwanted when you forget to click the text-frame first. The result: you are brought to another page. This can be solved by placing a "go"-button. Furthermore there's a pretty strange order in the menu. For instants: one might expect all BMG-items together. Besides the strange order, also on this site the menulist is huge (23 items). A subdivision might be an idea. The sitemap is a great addition to the navigationsystem of the site.



The default of the fonts is pretty small. A lot of Elvis fans are elderly people, so maybe it's smart to keep an eye on that.



Because our goal is to have comments, we searched and searched and found another one: the amount of little images at the bottom of each page. Spinning navigation buttons, back to top, join E.I.N., vote and links back to the total frameset. On some pages there also are copyright notes and the names and functions of some people. In our opinion this is a little bit too much and not all items add something to the content of the page they’re on.
Another little remark we’d like to make is that the images at the top of each page (telling us the content of that specific page) have a different lay-out on every page. When you use the same structure for each page, we think it would be wise to do so for the header too.



Overall we don't have much real comments on the design of the site, except some minor remarks.



Rating: 9 out of 10


Content:

The contents of Elvis Information Network are somewhat specific in comparison to other Elvis sites. This is probably because of the co-operation with BMG Australia. For this reason, EIN has a lot of BMG news and information, old as well as new. We like the "old" way better, when David had split them up in different sub-sites.
The best parts of EIN are the "Media Monitor" and "What's New". These two sections are updated really often. To be honest we use it ourselves pretty often as source for our news. They bring you the latest Elvis / BMG news, as well as funny anecdotes. For instance, did you know that Elvis wrote a short poem at age 11, saying; 'Roses are red, violets are blue when a chicken gets into your house you should say shoe shoe' - which has been sold for $4000? These things are really great to read, and not available anywhere else!
For those who want a CD or book there’s a possibility to order all items directly. If you'd like to have more information on a book there's a short review to help you make your choice.
David also give credit to those who added items / content to the site and that’s an item which can’t be found on too many websites.



Another thing we can advise regarding EIN is the newsletter. Subscribe to it and you'll get often real news, instead of the usual "I have updated my site"-lists.



In other words: the "I" in EIN is really paid attention to. This is one of the more informative websites on the Internet.



Rating: 9 out of 10


Advice:


Now there's not a great deal to improve in this site. Minor points we can suggest are: use a bigger or more standard font-size, divide the menu in subsections or at least order it in a logical way, and otherwise: keep up the good work!



The site has quite a lot to offer, from the latest (BMG) news, books, the concert, keeping track of Elvis in all media and a special look at Elvis achievements "down under". Webmaster David seems to be a very active guy with lot’s of good contacts in the "Elvis world".



Congratulations, David and the EIN-team with our 3 Star Award!

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