Please Click Here If You Are Of Legal Drinking Age (beer.com)

Member Name: blackjane

Product:	beer.com
Date:	10/11/01 (158 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Er....Let me think about that one...

Disadvantages: Not nearly enough information about beer

If you were to type www.beer.com in the address window of your internet browser of choice, you might reasonably expect to see one of three outcomes:

• A holding page stating that 'This site has been registed on behalf of our client.'

• A page displaying an advert offering the sale of this domain name to you at a very reasonable price (ha!)

• A web site all about beer.

Thankfully for all of us this site does not fall into the first or second categories, otherwise this may have been a very short review indeed. However, it is arguable as to whether it really fits the bill in terms of the third possibility either.

For starters, the home page looks promising with a Flash 5 animation depicting a party scene and enticing you to click on one of the three regional options, namely 'Canada', 'United States', and 'Outside North America', provided of course you are of legal drinking age. Since I, like most of you I suspect, hail from Blighty, I opted to follow the 'Outside North America' option.

Somewhat surprisingly (or is it?) the site is not just about beer. In fact the beer content appears to take a back seat to the remainder of the content on the site. Beer is obviously a hook for the casual browser, but this site feels that it needs to offer much more to ensure the 'stickiness' that its venture capitalists and advertisers demand. Sections on Music, Sex and 'Now' appear to be pushed to the fore at the expense of information about your favourite beverages. In fact, the whole site begins to resemble 'Loaded' magazine after a while, leaving you with a higher chance of finding nipples than information on tipples.

However, if you dig a little bit further it is possible to discover some information about beer, although the site doesn't really make it particularly easy to find it. The best section to look at is the Beer 'A to Z
9;, which can be found at the following URL (just in case it's not totally obvious from using the menus on the site):

http://www.beer.com/ca/br/be_wob_cabrandsab.ht ml

Some of the beers have links to official sites, although sadly these are few and far between. As it is highly likely that your main reason for visiting the site would be to discover more about beer, I suspect that most people would come away disappointed, unless of course you were happy to find a bevvy of beauties and entertainment information in its place.

Many of the banner adverts are beer related, with links to selected brands of mainly American beers. Although some of these adverts may be of interest to visitors, it does make you wonder why you had to select your home region from the home page.

Other options (again to induce stickiness, presumably) include the ability to sign up for the beer.com newsletter, or even to get your very own beer.com e-mail address.

The site also has a search facility, but perhaps this example may show the limitations of its use. A simple search for the word 'Tiger' (as in the Tiger Beer that is served in many Indian restaurants in this country) produced five results. All five results were from the 'Beer.com girls' section, describing girls that were tigers between the sheets!

Sadly, although this site has a lot of information, it doesn't have nearly enough information about beer, which is what you might have reasonably expected it to excel at. In failing in this respect, it most certainly doesn't warrant a place in my favourites folder, although I suspect that there may be other people who would like the other aspects of this site far more than if it were a comprehensive beverage directory.

{An original Dooyoo opinion
© Blackjane 2001}

[Note: I have not answered the majority of the questions below as they are not really applicable to the review of a web site about b
eer.]

Summary: