Ten sites for sore eyes (Top Ten Websites)

Member Name: rappinhood

Product:	Top Ten Websites
Date:	14/11/05 (1537 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: You could spend a lot of time on these sites

Disadvantages: You could spend a lot of time on these sites

Choosing a top ten is always difficult, and this category is particularly tricky, given the amount of time I've spent on the web over the last several years. These are a mixture of sites I've been using for years and those I've discovered recently, but all of them are sites I visit regularly and recommend to others. Here they are in reverse order:

10. cheapflights.co.uk
The name says it all. I tend to book flights and accommodation separately and cheapflights is always one of my first stops. The front page of the site allows you to select flights, holidays, short breaks and hotels from the top menu. You can also look for late deals, weekend breaks, budget airlines, business travel. There are links to popular destinations and you can also click on a letter of the alphabet to find other destinations. Once you click on a destination you have to select an airport, then you get a tabbed page with lists of flights, with details and prices and links to airlines, subdivided by period and type of travel (e.g. summer 2006, business class, etc). The coloured tabs make the site easy to navigate and it loads quickly. This site provides a good guide to most of the available flight and holiday options and is worth a visit even if you end up booking somewhere else.

9. cbeebies.co.uk
This is a site I visit with my (nearly) three year old. The main page of Cbeebies features images of most of the characters she sees on television. I struggle to see the features sometimes, but her much younger eyes seem to be ok and she is able to point to or name the ones she's interested in. Clicking on a character takes you to the relevant section of the site, where you can access songs, games, theme tunes and more depending on what's available. On some pages there's an enlarged cursor so that children can use and see a mouse easily (this should really apply to all pages, I think). There are games for a variety of ages here, though adults will soon get bored with them. However, I love the songs almost as much as my daughter does, with current favourites being the Animal Alphabet (featuring phonics sounds), the Balamory theme tune and Storymakers karaoke (complete with flashing lights and additional instruments). The site is updated regularly as new programmes reach the screen. I haven't explored it all, as I let my daughter take the lead on this site, but so far I'm impressed by this brightly coloured, attractive site.

8. mozilla.org
The Mozilla Foundation is a collection of software developers who have developed cross-platform software based loosely on Netscape but without the bloat. Their best products are a speedy web browser called Firefox and a useful email client known as Thunderbird. I started using these a couple of years ago while they were still in beta and even then they knocked the socks off Internet Explorer (boo hiss) and Outlook Express. Both of them can be configured to your needs via the ever growing range of extensions and can satisfy the eye through a large collection of themes. Favourite extensions for Firefox are Scrapbook, which allows you to save information via a right click menu, SessionSaver, which allows the browser to remember the pages you were browsing when you shut it down and CustomizeGoogle. Top picks for extending Thunderbird are VirtualIdentity (which allows you to send mail from any email address) and Signature (which allows you to have a range of possible signatures to add to the end of your emails). I particularly like Firefox's tabbed browsing and Thunderbird's Global Inbox, but there are too many other great features to list here. Mozilla also have a number of other projects underway, including the promising Calendar/Sunbird project which I'll download as soon as it can synchronise with my Palm Lifedrive.

7. iwantoneofthose.com
IWOOT (as they like to call themselves) is a great site for gadgets, toys, puzzles and games. It also has useful (but fun) things for the home, office toys, travel accessories and kitsch (their word, not mine). As well as looking at categories, you can search by price, a useful feature if you have a particular budget in mind. This site is always worth a browse for present shopping. I find men difficult to shop for and I've managed to source Christmas and birthday gifts for my husband, brother-in-law and best friend's husband for the last few years. The site is easy to navigate and loads quickly. Again, I have never had a problem with payment nor have my details been released into the wild, and delivery has always been timely. This site is aptly named, as I always think that at least once every visit.

6. bbc.co.uk
Everything BBC is here. As a journalism lecturer, the news part of the site is invaluable, whether to keep up with breaking news online, to listen to programmes being broadcast, or to listen to programmes that I have missed (available for a week via the 'Listen Again' function). However, I've also used it for local news and weather, TV listings (keeping track of episodes being shown) and of course Cbeebies. This is an easy to use and well categorised site, though I find the search function cumbersome. There is lots of useful information on almost any area of interest. In fact, there's so much that I won't say more than this: bbc.co.uk is great; visit it

5. dooyoo.co.uk
I'm relatively new to online reviews/opinions, having started in July this year. Like many people, I write ops on several sites (ciao, epinions, reviewcentre and so on), but dooyoo wins with me for several reasons. I like the crowns system - it seems to work well and quickly and I like the fact that an op can (in theory at least) win a crown at any time, even if it's been up a while). The product suggestion tool is fantastic and removes one of the site's major annoyances. I also like the clean, uncluttered interface (not the green, though) and the fact that unlike other sites, dooyoo thinks I'm grownup enough to decide for myself how fast I'm allowed to read an op. The only niggle is that there's no guestbook (yes, I do know about tooyoo) but I still think this is the best of the op sites.

4. firstdirect.com
I'm a big First Direct fan. I've been banking with them since 1997 when a long commute and an evening course meant I had no time to do my banking during the day. Their telephone banking staff were efficient and courteous, so when they suggested I sign up for online banking a few years ago, I jumped at the chance. It was easy to set up my internet password over the phone and I soon received a letter with the appropriate codes to logon to the site. First Direct take security very seriously and there's often an advice screen before you reach the main one. Once you've logged in, the front page gives you access to balances for all your accounts, messages from First Direct, and a menu from which you can pay bills, setup standing orders, view statements, order chequebooks, find information about rates and other products and communicate with the staff. You can download statements in Excel, Money and Quicken formats and connect to the site through Money to update your banking information. Some functions (such as making international electronic transfers) require you to ring in, but all others can be done easily from the site. I have never had a problem with them.

3. ezinearticles.com
This is a site that features free to reprint content for websites, ezines and email newsletters. I use it mostly as an author. Creating an account is as simple as filling out the one page signup form and replying to the confirmation email. That gives you a basic membership which allows you to submit up to 10 articles (again on a one-page form). Each article is vetted by an editor and then uploaded. You can create a brief bio of yourself and can put a resource box with a link to your site. This site is fantastic - a week after uploading my first article I was able to find my site on Google - and is a must if you want to get your name known and build traffic to your website. There are two additional levels of membership: Basic Plus (up to 25 submissions) and Platinum (unlimited submissions). Other features on the site include a weblog and members forum (which isn't accessible from the members' site for some obscure reason). As a publisher, you can link to the articles, pick up rss feeds in various categories and make use of the content. I have found several of my articles reprinted on other sites with a link both to ezinearticles and to my own site - a win-win situation as far as I'm concerned.

2. amazon.co.uk (and amazon.com)
I love this site. I've been using it for six years and I have never had a problem with an order, a payment or a delivery. I have never received any spam, either. This is a site that works. Although it is somewhat scary that they can make on-target recommendations as to what you might like to buy, this is no different from what supermarkets do with your purchase information and is more transparent. You can buy books, DVDs, music, gadgets, electronics, toys and lot, lots more and the US site gives even more options (I use this for buying gifts for family in the US). This site saved my life the year my daughter was born, as I was able to do all my Christmas shopping from my computer and most of it from this site. I probably visit the site at least a couple of times a week and although I know there are sites that are sometimes cheaper for books, but Amazon is reliable and sometimes that's what you need.

1. Google
Google is less of a website than an industry. I haven't put a suffix because there are several Google sites I visit every day. The search engine is unparalleled in my opinion and the search function is also shown to good advantage in Google's Google Mail (Gmail) services, which I've been using for about a year. This mail service features a whopping 2.6GB (and counting) of storage, labels to tag your messages so you can find them again, conversation view (which groups messages with the others related to them) and many other useful features. Other Google services I use include Alerts (to keep track of when someone has referenced one of my articles), Maps (to find where I'm going), Google Reader (beta), an rss/newsgroup reader. Cool tools include Google Earth (satellite mapping), Picasa 2 (digital picture manager) and Froogle (a shopping comparison site). You can find the full list of options here: http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/. Google do what they do well and make my internet experience easier and pleasanter and that's why they're in the top position.

Thanks for reading.

Summary: These are valuable sites that are easy to navigate and work well.