Loose Grooves, Singapore

Today I received an email from Fadzuli, who mentioned that a group of people who attended our Internet Business Workshop in early 2008 (or was it late 2007?) have put together a website and blog for their own business.

In the email, Fadhli @ Komeng, mentioned:

Thank you so much for checking out my website. I seriously did not expect you to even look it up. Haha. Actually my decision a year ago to attend a course conducted by Abang Abu, Nur Shaheed and yourself turns out to be the catalyst to start this initiative.

I must admit, although I expect the participants to start putting stuff online, I didn’t expect them to remember any of us, the least me. And to be mentioned as the catalyst to get their project started – is an honour.

Therefore, I’d like to return the favour by writing a review on their website. Hopefully, they will find benefits from my review and take my criticisms positively.

Loose Grooves - Singapore's Premier Action Sports School

First of all, their domain name is lgskateboards.sg. Now, that is an AWESOME choice of keywords to be included in the domain name. Loose Grooves, aims to promote skateboarding and bmx-ing as action sports through their educational tours at schools islandwide. So the domain name scores full marks for hitting the right keywords! Congrats!

Now let’s look at the overall design of the website. I’m guessing that LG wants to portray a street appeal with a cool black theme. That’s cool, but the choice of background image and the white text running across didn’t quite do it for me. I don’t have much trouble reading the content, but others mights. My suggestion would be to have the background image brightened instead of darkened, and then have a…ah, it’s probably hard to visualise, but something needs to be done to the layout. Ok, here’s an example. Check out the Haji Lane website. It has a black appeal, but the content is within a higher contrast background.

Moving on to the actual content, the homepage has a focal point that can draw the visitors and get them hooked to the website. That focal point is the video. This is a great example on the clever use of multimedia. One way to improve this aspect is to have a headline and short introduction on the video. This will make the video more prominent to the visitors.

The sections on the website (or the menu items) has a couple of sections that is “under construction”. My comments for this is, “If it’s not ready, better not show.” Perhaps a better way to present this is to have a message that goes “LG is still producing the media files. In the mean time, LG has scoured the Internet to present you the following related videos.” – or something to that extent.

Alright, I’d love to write more about Loose Grooves, but I’m sure they would also like to give their 2-cents worth. Keep in touch, guys! Well done!!

PS: their tagline is quite close to what I have for Ed Borhan – Singapore’s Premier Professional DotNetNuke Company…nice!