For CD Collectors Only

It might look strange why we didn’t review THE Elvis Presley page on the world wide web earlier, but since last summer the webmaster, Willem Kaauw, has an "Editors note" on his site, which told us that he would have a big change (server, content) in October. We expected it to be last October, but now it seems we were too optimistic.

Design.


Behind a not much used (because most sites links directly to the menu) entrance page there is a big menu, you might even say "a gynormous menu". Besides the number of entries, which could be easily split up in our opinion, the menu-buttons are big as well. Since there is no alternate text for the buttons, it takes a pretty long time before you know were to click. Most fans won’t have real problems with that, because after a few times you’ll know where your section of interest is "hidden" and the date of the last update next to the buttons also helps finding your destination pretty soon. But still, especially for "first timers", it might to be a good idea to make the buttons smaller or to add an alternate text for each button.


Overall the navigation itself is fair, disregarding long pages you have to work through sometimes, there is always a clear link to your destionation and back to a higher level.


Rating: 7/10


Content.


As the size of the menu already indicates the content is huge. Especially the information on this site is what makes it THE Elvis Presley page on the WWW. As the title of the site states it is mainly focused on CD-collectors, especially the huge import (bootleg) part of the site is a real goldmine for the fans. Almost every bootleg is listed, complete with cover, tracklisting and most often a rating or even a complete review. The great thing about those reviews is that they are from all over the world, so you have not one guy’s vision and/or taste to help you choose (when you are lucky enough to be able to get some of the older titles).


Also the popular Elvis Import Top 40 (of which we present the weekly top 3) resides on this site, which helps a lot of fans to decide which albums to go for.


We won’t list the complete content, if you don’t know it already, have a look yourself. But another part we have to mention is the picture vault. Probably not the largest number of pictures, but without any doubt you’ll find the best pictures regarding quality on this site. Most of them are pretty rare too.


Last, but cetainly not least: the newssections, which used to be a reason to visit the site at least once a day in the past. Since there aren’t too many releases lately this part of the site gets less updated, unfortunately from the view of a fan, but it is lucky for us, otherwise we should reconsider our scaling system.


Rating: 10/10


Advise


What can we say? The great content (the best we are aware of) on this site can hardly get better, but there might be some improvements to open it up. A shorter main-menu, dividing the huge bootleglist in smaller parts, an extra entrance to the bootlegs on recordingdate and/or a division between live- and studiowork are possibilities. Another solution might be to put the main-menu on each page, either in a frameset or a table-like solution.


One important remark about the menubuttons is already given in the review itself.


Also there could be some visual upgrades (fontstyle/size), but now we are really searching. So it’s probably time to stop this review and give Willem a big applause for the work he did, does and hopefully will do for a very, very long time. We are proud to present him the last ElvisNews.com Award of this Millennium, a 3 Star one (of course).