Blakeney Manor

http://www.blakeneymanor.com/
Blakeney Manor is run by, and designed for, people who enjoy reading the Scarlet Pimpernel series by Baroness Orczy. The first book, The Scarlet Pimpernel, was written in 1905, and there are 19 stories and books in the entire series. The stories mainly take place during the French Revolution, and the Scarlet Pimpernel is an Englishman who is trying to rescue people from the death by the guillotine.

Intended Audience:

• Fans of the Scarlet Pimpernel books and their movie adaptations.
• A part of their audience may be drawn to the site because the site hosts the complete text of the entire series, and many of the books are out of print or extremely different to locate physically.

Usefulness of Content:

• Besides hosting the entire book series, the site provides tons of useful information about the series itself and the time setting the books are placed in. There are pages on the clothing and fashion of the time, a detailed analysis of the historical accuracy of the series, information on the historical figures of the books who were real players in the French Revolution, newspaper coverage of the French Revolution, and much, much more.
• Each book in the series comes with an introduction, including its placement in the series chronologically, and a brief summary. Most pages also mention who typed up the text of the book to make it available to the public.

Consistency of Design:

• Despite the wonderfully useful content, the design of the site is very bad. Many of the internal pages do not contain a navigation bar or a link back to the home page. Some of the pages lack a title or any identification of which level or layer the user is at in the website.
• Each of the first level pages (the ones listed on the homepage, or in the navigation bar), has a different design or template. The "Books" and "Links" pages look completely different from the rest of the first level pages, each lacking a navigation bar.
• Some pages contain full text links, for example this page which contains information about Baroness Orczy. However, many of the pages contain links that are only "clickable" through an adjacent icon or image, such as this page on the history of the series. It's very frustrating that there is no consistency to the linking of outside websites or internal pages.

Ease of Navigation

• Many of the internal pages display the site name and logo at the top of the screen, but the logo is not itself a link back to the home page. When one does get lost inside the site, there is no easy way back to home except punching the "Back" button of the browser several times.
• On the "Links" page, there seems to be a problem with the code itself. The hyperlinks at the top of the page seem to be anchor links, tagged for somewhere further down on the page. However, none of the links work.
• The site map is a wonderfully detailed explanation of the site itself, and all of its content. This is my preferred way of interacting with the site. When I tried to navigate my own way around the site, I had no idea just how much information the authors had created - many of the pages I had so much difficulty in navigating that I never learned some content existed, such as the page of free downloads.
• Too many of the links are animated icons, which I find frustrating because I don't want to wait for the icon to load to know where it links to (sometimes the site is slow and this is a problem). Some of the icons that are designed this way do not include a link description, which makes them even worse, if a screen reader was needed to describe the page and help a user select a link that they need.

It sounds like I don't like this site, which isn't true. The creators have done a wonderful job providing access to, and information about, one of my favorite series of books. However, I feel that it is hard for the users of the site to find all the information that is available, because of the site's underlying structure and navigation issues.