Teresa's Safe Haven For Elvis

Design

Upon entrance you'll find quite some animated gifs. This makes the page pretty slow to load. The intro-page is even worse regarding speed, a huge backgroundimage and the ever present midi-medley don't speed up. To our disgust (sorry, we are no midi-fans) we still heard midi after stopping it. Looking at the source of the page we found out there was both midi defined as backgroundmusic (so the listener isn't able to turn it off) and through the embedded midi-file, which gives the impression you can turn off that terrible sound.
Every pages has a different (often huge) backgroundimage, this makes the site pretty inconsistent. Also the readability isn't too good. With short texts it isn't a real problem, but with longer texts, like the biography it is hard to keep concentrated on the text.
All over the site some images are not visible and several transperant gifs (especially on the linkspage) are looking pretty poor on the colourful background.
Regarding navigation this site is very clear. The menu at the left is large, you have to scroll down for the lower items and that isn't too user-friendly. But it is functional, and makes clear what you can expect when clicking an item. Most often the items are only one page deep, and when there are more pages, there's a link back. A little minor is the way external links are handled: they open in the main frame of this site. This doesn't honour the design of other pages. A better way is using the whole page or a new page.

Rating 6/10

Content

This site is a basic fan page, and the content is in keeping with that fact. There's a short biography, some fanclub information, an overview of Movieposters, a page with some quotes, a linkspage and an awards page. All these are very basic and of the "thirteen in a dozen"-type.
Two pages deserve more than average attention. The "Where's Elvis"-page is really interesting. The webmistress is collecting references to Elvis in the media: songs, tv-series, commercials, movies and so on. This subject might be worth a complete website, but the collection on this site is a nice starter. Strictly coincidentally we got some reader's input on this subject too, and we placed it this very week (see "the legacy of Elvis").
The Video's/Books/CD's-page is an overview including covers, but unfortunately without the webmistress' own opinion on the items. Still it's a nice overview of Amazon's shelves.
Closing the long menu is a button that offers some info on the webmistress herself. A personal touch, making the visitor know who's behind this tribute.

Rating 6/10

Advise

Make the look and feel a little more consistent. The basic design is good enough, but when you shorten the menu the overview is much better for the visitor. You can do this for instants by removing some of the separate entrances (main and intro can easily be put together, same counts for awards and webrings), removing the buttons or adding text to the buttons (instead of separate text-links). Also try to limit the amount of different and the size of background images. And get rid of that second midi!
Regarding content it might be a nice idea to add some personal comments on e.g. the links- and video's/books/CD's-pages.