Review of Cinema Hosting site
http://www.cinemahosting.com
Cinema hosting is a web design and
hosting company dedicated to independent cinema owners in America. The target of
this site is that it is effectively a way to outsource the design, maintenance
and hosting of a cinema's website. The principle of the site is fairly simple as
it uses a number of predefined templates which are then customised for a cinema
company along with a mixture of customised information such as show times along
with a selection of syndiated film information such as trailers and links. There
was a similar company in the UK a number of years ago who created the sites for
a large number of UK Independent cinema sites, but I'm not sure if the company
still exists in the same way – perhaps a Screentrade reader can let me
know.
This site consists of only six
pages of which it is nearly all made up of text broken down into sections. There
is the normal menu options in the top right corner and also one in the footer. I
was rather disappointed by this site, but this is a personal opinion rather than
for any technical reason. The site is fairly easy to navigate as it has the
traditional text menu at the top right hand side of the page. This is just
underneath the contact information for the company.
One of the pages of the site lists
the prices for a years hosting and site maintenance with cinema hosting when
compared to another hosting site, and it is here that you can see the difference
in prices between the two. On the one hand the prices which are quoted seem high
for the hosting and general maintenance of the site as all the sites will be
using the same backend servers and templates. There is a whole section of the
site dedicated to the templates which are available to look at. There are 14
different site templates which are available to demo, although they seem pretty
normal in terms of design.
For a company which is hosting
sites for a large number of cinemas and who has a link in each of their footers
I am surprised at how few cinemas are listed on the site – I would expect to
find a list of all the cinemas who are their clients.
However, if you want a company to
sort you out a website where you have very little work to do, but always is up
to date then I guess this company is worth looking at as they specialise in our
part of the business. As someone who runs their own website there are often
times when I wish I could pay someone else to do some of the work involved in
keeping it fresh and up to date for me. If I owned a cinema then I would be
tempted by their service, I just don't think the site necessarily does the web
design justice.
If you would like Screentrade to
review a particular website, please contact me directly on: webmaster@madcornishprojectionist.co.uk.
Download
Times:
|
Connection
Rate |
Download
Time |
|
14.4K |
28.01
seconds |
|
28.8K |
15.01
seconds |
|
33.6K |
13.15
seconds |
|
56K |
8.69
seconds |
|
ISDN
128K |
4.05
seconds |
|
T1
1.44Mbps |
2.18
seconds |
Navigation:
*****
Good Design:
*****
Updates: ***
Content **
Download Speed: *****
Overall: ***
Overall: Technically there is
nothing wrong with this website, but in terms of content and knowing which
companies use the service the site is a bit of a let down. What makes this site
interesting is really the service it offers not what's on the
site.
Testing
Information:
This site is tested using a laptop
at 1024 x 768 resolution running Windows XP, Firefox Version 2.0.0.6 and
Internet Explorer 7 over an 8Mb Broadband connection. The site is also now being
tested on an Asus EEE PC. For the text only test Lynx on a Linux Server is used.
A website entitled WebSiteOptimization.com is used to test
the web site to calculate the download
speeds.
