Casino.de
The following is a paid review: I took a look at http://www.casino.de/ and here is my review of the site…
First off, let me say that I am not a gambler… Sure, I gamble with my life every time I walk out the front door, or drive on the freeway, but that’s just the way I do it. When it comes to putting money on the table, I rarely have any to put down. Still, I know gambling is a popular pastime and I’ve learned a thing or two from Kenny Rogers (as well as Kenny Loggins) over the years, so I thought I’d impart my wisdom to you…
Casino.de is in German, and I don’t know much German, except for Willkommen and a few other words, but the design of the site is actually pretty fitting. Graphically, it’s well done, and while I could do with less of the blinky animated GIFs, it’s probably right for the intended audience, which in the marketing world, is all good…
I noticed they went with XHTML 1.0 Strict for the DOCTYPE when authoring pages, and while I often use Transitional myself, I do like to see people use Strict, but… they missed the mark on this, as there are a number of errors, many from using <br> instead of <br /> and a few cases of using attributes that do not exist in the Strict DOCTYPE. These are problems that are easily fixable, and I’d give the site a higher score if it was valid XHTML 1.0 Strict.
That aside, they have an English site at online-casinos.com which I can read. Again, not knowing much about gambling, I am at a loss, but with this site they choose to use HTML 4.01 Transitional (which I personally only use for HTML emails nowadays.) There are just a few errors on the home page, and again, they could be easily fixed. Again, the design is nice, and fitting to the subject, and… they’ve even got an RSS feed, which is nice to see. I did not see an RSS feed on casino.de, which I think it should have.
Casino.de appears to be running on Drupal 5, and hey, I always like to see more Drupal sites. But, they seem to be using Drupal 5.7, and I’d at least want to see them upgrade to the latest in the D5 branch, which as of this writing is Drupal 5.12 (sure, Drupal 6 would be better, but there may be reasons they’ve not upgraded to that yet… I mean, I still have Drupal 5 sites out there as well.)
So in conclusion, I found the design of Casino.de to be well done, and the content is probably good, though I don’t read German very well, and don’t know about gambling, and the code (well, the theme in this case) could use a little cleaning up, and they get points for using Drupal, but they should really upgrade.