Elvis Is Alive

This time we decided to pick one from our volunteers-list. A Russian site this time, one of the few sites originating from the former Eastern European countries.

Design

One of the first things that attract the attention when visiting this site is the overall design. It makes you think of one of the best-designed sites around, The King’s Realm. The way the banner is designed and the menustyle both look pretty similar. This is also where the similarity ends, because The King’s Realm is from a different level. ‘Elvis is Alive’ looks unfinished because of some garbled graphics (among them the main menu), graphics that are obviously designed for another background and poor animated gifs (because of the palette and non-fitting images). Webmaster Yuri is also very early with placing a Christmas tree this year, probably it will be dead by the time it’s Christmas, 350 days from now. Another minor in the design is the alignment of the text. Most often it is centred, which is a little disturbing while reading larger amounts of them.

On the other hand the navigation around the site is good. There’s always a link back to the mainmenu and when necessary also a link to another submenu (bootlegs/BMG). When needed there is a simple frameset with a submenu, so you can find your way easily on this site! Mainly the same background is used, but a couple of times Yuri changes background, which is certainly with ‘The Concert’ very disturbing, because you can hardly read the submenu. The "last update"-date next to the menu is very helpful, although it doesn’t fit completely in the design and it also shows some of the pages really need an update….

Rating: 6/10

Content

Except for the Elvis Is Alive nonsense the content of the site is pretty good. Honest reviews like Yuri’s can help others to decide what they need and what they do not need to buy. The video-reviews are very original, but unfortunately a little short. By the way, we never knew there was a contest in the NBC special… whatever the contest was, Elvis surely did win!

On Yuri’s site you can find a nicely written (short) biography of Elvis and when hitting the statistics-button you won’t get the expected site-statistics, but some general statistics on Elvis.

Yuri’s linkspage offers what we wanted so often in the past: some short remarks about the sites that he lists, so you’ll know what to expect. Yuri is certainly going for our 9 Star Award with his remarks about us ("The Elvis Telegraph had a redesign and now it has a new name. Probably the best Elvis News site. Check it!").

Yuri’s picturegallery exists of pictures from other websites, it would have been nice when he credited them.

Rating: 7/10

Advise

This website has a strong base with the reviews and some basic information, which isn’t present on a lot of the sites around. Yuri can easily lift his site to a higher level by polishing some of the graphics and/or by doing a little redesign. Of course tastes differ, but Yuri’s main background makes things hard to fit. Certainly things like his pretty "futuristic" menu on a kind of old-fashioned, sombre background makes his site look like "a collection from a flee-market".

Also tiny things like forgetting to remove a time-link (the Christmas- tree) and typos like the NBC-contest can be handled easily and will surely improve the site.

We hope we’ll have reason to reconsider in the near future and will be able to give Yuri one of our awards later.