Ferry’s Place

Ferry put his site up for one of our reviews (giving us an incomplete url which isn’t a too good start for our reviewteam), but we found, we saw and we passed judgement.

Design

Entering Ferry’s Place we were pleasantly surprised we just missed Elvis himself. Ferry claims The King paid him a visit, just a week before we surfed in, and added some changes to the site. So we’re in good company here.

The site has a black / yellow lay-out and consists of some very long pages. The main menu has 3.5 Elvis items, and 2.5 non-Elvis items. For those wondering what the .5 stands for that’s the linkspage with both Elvis and non-links. On the front page we find some links, one with again a wrong url and one other link to his other site which is still under construction but has some nice pencil-drawings of Elvis by Betty Harper.

Navigation is pretty easy and consequent. You can follow a link and on the new page there’s a new menu and always a back button at the bottom of the page. A minor is that the alphabetic-menu for the most interesting part of this site, the guitar tabs, is a bit hidden between two banners. You have to look for it between the other text on this page.

A big minor on the site is the midi-file which is started automatically but there’s no button allowing the visitor to turn it of.

Rating: 7/10

Content

What makes this site special in comparison to other Elvissites is the guitartabs-section, we know of only one other site providing this kind information which is also made by a Dutch Elvisfan. There are tabs for 238 Elvissongs available which is quite a collection.

The other content consists of some crap about him still being alive and a nice joke comparing Elvis and Jesus (or was it the other way around?), a few pictures of Elvis and the Graceland mansion, and some very outdated release-info with the wrong covers. It seems like Ferry started this section quite some time ago but never finished it. This disqualifies the site a little because it only draws the attention from the most interesting part of this particular site, the guitar tabs of Elvis songs.

Rating: 7/10

Advice

Our general conclusion is that this site has some very special information which makes it stand out from other Elvissites and draws a specific kind of visitor. We think a webmaster who takes pride in his work will clean up some small carelessness on his site. These can irritate people in general and our reviewteam in particular. Still because of the consequent design, the navigationstructure and pretty unique content our general conclusion is positive.

1. Our first advice, please add a button allowing the visitor to turn off the music.

2. Make sure the information you offer is up-to-date (e.g. release information).

3. Improve the navigation of the tab’s-section.

4. Make sure that the links you put on your site are working.

We’re glad we can give out an award this week to Ferry to compliment him on adding something special to Elvis-sites around the World Wide Web.