Well its 5am at the moment though because of the beauty of crap mobile broadband, this won’t go live for quite some time – and the sun’s going to be up soon, so its a great time to tell you that we’re doing something a little different to usual. We’re going to take a look and review the website http://www.testfreaks.co.uk
This isn’t something we’d normally do like I said, but just roll with it – this is actually pretty good, I guess, if I’m honest, this came about when a nice chap called Jay came along, he asked if we’d take a look, and we happily obliged.
What Is Test Freaks?
Test Freaks is a website for reviewing everything from camcorders to games and everything in between, technology related. The site heavily relies on user content to rate the technology products using their unique ranking system called ‘FreakScore’ (a pretty catchy name to be honest). It balances reviews based on the Test Freaks Basic review combined with expert reviews, user reviews, and forum posts. A kind of Metacritic that doesn’t restrict itself to movies and games.
First Up – Design
The design seems to have been very well thought out, it is clean and oddly welcoming, for the strange colour scheme of orange and green. I find the layout to be very efficient, it gets the information to you without any distractive graphics. They do keep the design interesting with a funky logo, which looks like it’s been professionally designed. Wow I’m being nice, don’t faint anyone!
Navagation
I did unfortuantley have a little bit of trouble navagating throughout the site, once you visit a product from the home page, it does all change, but with the intellegent search which queries whilst you type in what you want, it helps you get by – I typed in quite a few items, including my digital camera, (nikon d40x) & Far Cry 2 page, which I recently revieved myself (though I was a little sad to see that it had a score – read my Far Cry 2 for more details).
What’s Good
I like the links to price running sites, which I’m guessing is an affiliate thing, but that aside, it’s actually useful, I like the concept. You research your item, you read about it with a basic review from Test Freaks & then the more indepth reviews from the users, who actually own the item themselves – if you like what you see and read (I say see too, because most items include a gallery, and some items like games, even include trailers).
I like its wiki-style user content systems – the users sign up easily, visit the site, give their two pennies worth and can hang about as an ‘expert’ themsleves.
I like the ability to link straight to where I can find the best price for the item, thats handy, useful and I would use it myself.
The search bar is awesome!
Great search engine friendly URL’s, it’s good to see good practice – something that so many people ignore, good job!
What’s Bad?
Unfortunatley there were a few niggles I had with this site and I must be honest. Lets start off easy:
It needs more markup! Its obviously a database driven website, which makes this sort of thing easier. All links need at least a repeat of the actual text as labels. Why? Simple, because there are accessibility issues without them, and certainly inhibits blind users, who are potential users too. The images have basic image alt tags and could be improved a little.
Ok something a little heavy duty, this site basically couldn’t function in internet explorer 6. I’m not entirely sure why as I’m not exactly being a consultant here, its a review! But to hazard a guess I’d say its down the the fancy scripting, ajax or just javascript being used. What happends? Well I’ve tried it on 2 computers with IE6, and both of them repeated it. They lagged out completedy, using over 50% CPU. As much as we’d all like IE6 to be dead, it’s still used a lot, and without seeing the stats for Test Freaks, they may find they get a minimal amount, but even 10% is worth catering for – but just to reassure, it works fine in Firefox, IE7 & Safari.
Ok what’s next up on my hitlist. Well it has to be that I actually struggled to find a bad item. Now perhaps everything is great! But i seriously doubt it! I looked through loads of catagoreies, there were a handful of un-rated items, but everything had a FreakScore over 85, and most we well over 90. Perhaps it’s bias, or perhaps everything is great!.
Some pages were short on content, some of them had no use reviews which I guess was a litte off putting, but this is something that will just grow in time!
Conclusion & Final Thoughts
We wouldn’t lie to you unless it a) made us super rich b) made me feel better. But anyway, this isn’t one of those times when I will lie to you. This site overall is pretty good, it provides a useful service & a great range of technologies to enahance the experience. Sure I highlighted some issues, but they are relatively minor & can be fixed. Go check out http://www.testfreaks.co.uk/ and see whatcha think for yourselves. I’ve popped a few links in throught the article to varios sections I visited.
One thing that would be really nice is if Test Freaks added a page dedicated to FreakScore just to explain what it is. I mean I worked it out, but you have to cater for everyone. Perhaps it is there, but I couldn’t find it.
Useful Links
Test Freaks blog is worth a read
Frequently Asked Questions – though this is ‘coming soon’ I felt it is an important link
Test Freaks Forum
