Lisa's Elvis Page

"Don’t Be Cruel" Lisa Marie Harper asked, when she volunteered for a review. We never have the intention to be cruel, but honesty may hurt sometimes.

Design

The screenshot above tells it all. Upon entering the site the banners and the mediaplayer kill what could have been a nice page entry. We know ourselves that free sites always use these, but popup-windows are less disturbing than a fixed banner, and when you know the banner have to be placed, keep it in mind while designing the layout. Overall the layout is quite (not quiet!) unstructured. Within one page parts are centred, while other parts are aligned to the left, which makes it look a bit messy. The same inconsistency can be seen in the use of (navigation) buttons: sometimes they have borders, sometimes they don’t.


The navigation structure itself is good. The same menu is used on every page and within the picture-galleries and movie-pages there are easy to use previous and next buttons. But why the use of the same picture for all buttons in the mainmenu? The only minus regarding the navigation is the way the thumbnails of the pictures are used: they open the picture in the same window, so the backbutton of the browser is needed to return to the gallery.


Rating: 5/10

Content

The most interesting part on the site is a huge photo-gallery. It’s obviously a collection of pictures gathered on the World Wide Web, but it’s nice for visiting fans to have them (all) collected on one site.


The movie pages give a picture of each movie-poster, an overview of the used songs and some more pictures from the particular movie.


The Midipage has a pretty large list of midifiles. Unfortunately including some typos, and worse some even with the wrong title, so they can’t be found when looking for them. For example, when you look for "Fools Rush In" you can’t find it in the right place, because it is listed as "Only Fools Rush In" on Lisa’s site.


The fourth part on the site, the links-section, is just fake. It has a link to one, absolutely non-(Elvis related) page.


Rating: 5/10

Advise

Because the site looks like a first try at html, it might be a good idea to look around on the WWW and see what is possible and get some ideas. The most important is to be consistent in your design. Some small tips to improve quickly:


The picture gallery could be improved by either opening a new window for the pictures or by making a page for every picture, with a (back/next) navigation-structure.


We mentioned the mediaplayer already. Luckily it is visible, so you can turn off the midi immediately, but when it would be placed at the bottom of the page, it would give a much better first impression. And please give the visitors a choice. Do not autostart those midifiles.


Wasn’t it Elvis himself who sung "hurt to think that you lie to me" too? With Elvis we prefer honesty above trying to be nice. Hopefully with these hints in mind Lisa can improve her site, so we’ll have to reconsider in the future. For now we can’t give an award.