Just A Mouse Click Away! (5minutesaway.co.uk)

Member Name: aljones

Product:	5minutesaway.co.uk
Date:	30/07/01 (851 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Get you cheap places off the motorway

Disadvantages: Not everywhere is listed

5minutesaway.co.uk is a great site that provides you with the locations of facilities and attractions within 5 minutes or 3 miles of most motorway junctions. The aim of the site is to avoid us getting ripped of at the over-priced motorway service areas. In a nutshell, you click on the motorway you'll be travelling on (or indeed are travelling on if you use the internet on the move), then on the junction number you are going to stop at, and up pops a list of types of amenities. Choose what type of amenity you want, and you get a list of locations, directions, etc.

OK, so lets consider it in a bit more detail. When you first load the site, you get directed to a very pointless welcome page, which doesn't tell you anything about the site and just has an arrow that you click on to get to the main index page of the site. A little pointless, but at least it isn't Flash ridden, and so loads very fast and doesn't really prevent access to the site. Also, you needn't bookmark this intro page, and so need never go there again.

Once into the site, it is very simple and basic, though well laid out and very intuitive to use. They haven't cluttered up the site with any useless stuff, and so the page is simply formed of three parts: top, left and right. The top is simply a title bar, with a few menu options such as 'Home' and 'Contact Us' in the form of little clickable icons. To the right is an information window, which is where all the information you will ever view will appear. To begin with it contains instructions and an introduction to the site. Throughout the site, this frame will contain either instruction on what you can do next, or will contain details of services.

On the left hand side, the frame contains the menu for motorways and their junctions. To begin with it has a list of all the motorways the site covers. The site seems fairly comprehensive, and covers most motorways. The motorways covered are the
M1, M2, M3, M4, M5, M6, M8, M9, M11, M20, M23, M26, M27, and the M40. Although it covers two of the Scottish motorways, it seems to miss most of the smaller motorways found in the middle of the country. Also, it appears to miss out the A1(M) motorway, which is now becoming quite large and heavily used.

Once you click on your motorway, the left frame then changes to a list of motorway junction. All of the junctions are displayed, though some are dulled out if they have no facilities off them. The junction list also notes the location of some of the motorways services, though strangely not all of them. Once a junction has been selected, the right frame changes to provide a list of categories for facilities near to that junction, such as 'Accommodation', 'Restaurants & Pubs', and 'Fuel'. The number of categories obviously varies from junction to junction. After selecting a category, you get a list of facilities in the category pop up.

Along with the name of each facility you get basic information such as the service they provide, their address and directions on how to get there. There are also links to get further information on the facility, such as opening times and the like. Generally that is all the information that you need, as when it say McDonalds, or Texaco Petrol Station, you tend to already know what you're going to get when you get there.

As far as content is concerned its not bad. The information they provide is in no way complete, and they lay no claims to having covered everything. For example, I most often travel along the M$, and know of a few places where I stop just off the motorway. One example is the Sainsburys SavaCentre off Junction 12, which gets no mention, though the McDonalds just outside does. The same goes for Junction 32 just outside Cardiff, where there is a McDonalds and a large ASDA, and a petrol station. Yet it mentions none of these, except for another petrol station over a mile a
way.

OK, so the site isn't perfect and does need a lot of work to get more information on to it. What information is there is very good, and does point out several places you could go to save you from the hefty prices at the motorway services. If it covered more places, especially large supermarkets, then it would be an invaluable resource.

As it is, it’s a pretty good site. The layout is excellent, and is very easy to understand and use. At no point are you left wondering what to do next, or wondering how to do something. Although I haven't tried it, you can e-mail them or fill in an on-line comment form. There is also a form that you can fill in to advertise your business. This I'm sure would be invaluable to small pubs and the like that have no other way of advertising themselves to the passing motorways users. However, I think the site would benefit with a similar, but less in-depth, form that motorway users could fill in to alert the site of places that they have found, such as the supermarkets that I have mentioned above.

The site is fairly quick, though this obviously depends on your connection speed. Even on my quite slow connection though it never takes too long to load up a page, and for comparison I have found that it loads a page faster than Dooyoo does. As an additional product, it also has a WAP site. I won't review that, as I don't have a WAP phone and so have no way of seeing what it is actually like.

So, 5minutesaway.co.uk is a great resource, though it does need developing to be more complete and therefore even more useful. It will save you money if you are planning to buy stuff, though as far as just nipping in to go the toilets and buying a chocolate bar is concerned, you still won't find anywhere better than the motorway services. The site tends to publish smaller places, and not places where you can just wander in and do as you please. If you are looking for somewhere to eat of f
ill up you petrol tank, or somewhere to stop for the night to sleep, then it is fine.

Summary: