The King's Corner

Mike Hermenet (and Co.) asked us to review his page. So we did. When you enter the page you’ll get the impression that this guy must have a sour throat. He is shouting all the time (F.Y.I. continuous use of capitals).

Design:
The continuous use of multi-coloured, multi-sized and moving fonts is pretty repelling. It makes the text hard to read and gives you a feeling you’re back in the sixties on too much LSD. Of course this is mainly a matter of taste, but it works detracting on readability.

When you’ve gone through the text on the homepage you wonder "Is this it? Where is the content?" But wait, below a lot of (more or less unimportant) links (of which most pictures weren’t working) there are the links to the real content of the site. After finding this, the navigation is pretty clear. On each page there’s a link back to the previous (or next) one and to the homepage. Sometimes even to (almost) all other pages, which is a little inconsequent.
Another small point regarding the design is the huge amount of explanations, which should be put away behind some links for those interested. For example: people looking for the ads, want the ads, people wanting to place an add will look for the explanation anyhow.

On the links page a lot of the banners aren’t available, while a part of the others are displayed out of proportion. The link to the Elvis is Still Rockin’ fanclub appears quite often.

A big minor is the audiofile used as backgroundmusic on the pages, the audiofile is so big it took over five minutes to load the 2 megabytes on a cablemodem. Also it slows the rest of the page down. Another problem of using audio on webpages is that people surfing the web without having a soundcard installed (e.g. surfing at the office) have troubles loading the page, or have their browser crash on the audiofile.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Contents:

The ads-page on this site is the most interesting one, it is a nice idea, and not seen too often. The links page is not more than that. It would be nice if there was a short opinion about the destination-site below each link. Furthermore there isn’t much what makes this site outstanding. The Audio page is one of many, and the news page isn’t overloaded with news, perhaps because the news is divided over three pages, general news and (import) cd-news. We can’t write too much about the content of this site since three of the seven (main) menu-items refer to link-pages without anything but links.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Advise:

We’re sorry we cannot give Mike Hermenet and his staff an award, but since their intention is obviously a good one we will try to give some sound advise to upgrade the site.
First of all, try to use a coherent layout, less fontcolours, less fontsizes and less animation. This will make the site more restful for the eyes, and will upgrade the readability.
Try to be a little more consequent on the "bottom"-links, no different combinations on different pages, just use the same menu on all pages of the site.
Take the explanations away from the pages (or at least make them smaller) and put them behind a link.
A good idea might be to focus on your ads-part of the site, this could make the site stand out from others.
At last, but certainly not least, PLEASE add a turn-off button for the backgroundmusic because the loop gets pretty annoying after a while!