Elvis Stamps

Design

As stated before, the entrance is a real eye catcher, a very tasteful colour combination and nice graphics invites you, no better, demands you to come in. Inside you find ... more on that later, first the design.


Very nice of the designers is not to emphasize the "famous" $0.29 stamp from America. The navigation is clear, except when you go to the forth page of the stamps overview, because there is nothing more to list. There are four items in the main menu (and on some pages five, the home button). Some pages have a submenu to divide the content over smaller pages.


The use of colours and fonts is done consequently and with taste. You can zoom in on some pictures: a new window opens with a bigger picture in a high quality.


Looking at the use of space in a 1024x768 resolution there is a lot of unused space, especially with the chosen colour, it is emphasized. On the stamps-page the webmaster suddenly uses some very big images which makes the page run "over" the border of the page.


Rating: 8/10


Content


Surfing the site we can't but notice that it has a commercial goal, selling Elvis-stamps. With that in mind we take a closer look at the the content.


As stated above there are four (and sometimes five) items in the main menu, a biography, a discography, stamps and a guest book. Starting with the last item, the strange thing on this site that you must be a member of stampville.com to be able to sign it, so it seems the site isn't intended for "everyone".


From a commercial point of view it might be logical, because being a member makes the step to buying smaller probably, but we thought it is a little pushy. Also the main-logo of stampville.com isn't always working, which is a little less commercial. Visiting the "mother page", we see there are more sites dedicated to the stamps of celebrities, e.g. Marilyn Monroe.


The other items of the menu are "information" on Elvis, probably to inform the visitor about "that guy on the stamps". The biography is a one-on-one rip-off from the Graceland website. A comment we have to make is that when using information from another site mention the source.
The discography contains a list with thirteen mp3 samples of Elvis ' greatest hits and nine titles of Elvis' best movies. At least, this is according to the producer(s) of this site. We dare to doubt if there is an Elvis-fan behind it, because the listings are strange. The song list is at random, no logical order in it (chronological, alphabetical or any other order). The movie-list is even stranger... to mention "Clambake" among "the best", but not "King Creole" or "Flaming Star", to name a couple of the "lesser" movies... Our conclusion: nothing special here, but again, presented in a very slick way.

Zooming in on the stamps, the first thing we see is a big "not available yet" and two links to "stamp art" and "stamp sheets". Clicking these two links we find long pages with high quality images of framed stamps and stamp-sheets. They all have the possibility to zoom in and a possibility to buy them. looking at our own "collection" we can conclude it's not complete.


Strange is the fact that from the third sub-menu on the stamps page we're suddenly looking at stamps from Africa with Elephants. The sub-menu is enlarged from 4 to 22. But clicking those other menu-items we're not finding any Elvis.


Rating: 5/10


Advise


Our advise to the webmasters is very simple, keep up the good work on the design part, and put more work into the content. There are quite a few "Elvis-stamps" around, and it would be special to have them all collected in one place. There is another site with Elvis stamps, but that one isn't designed this beautifully. The other information is available elsewhere.