Cinema hosting is a web design and hosting company dedicated to independent cinema owners in America. The target of this site is that it is effectively a way to outsource the design, maintenance and hosting of a cinema’s website. The principle of the site is fairly simple as it uses a number of predefined templates which are then customised for a cinema company along with a mixture of customised information such as show times along with a selection of syndiated film information such as trailers and links. There was a similar company in the UK a number of years ago who created the sites for a large number of UK Independent cinema sites, but I’m not sure if the company still exists in the same way – perhaps a Screentrade reader can let me know.
This site consists of only six pages of which it is nearly all made up of text broken down into sections. There is the normal menu options in the top right corner and also one in the footer. I was rather disappointed by this site, but this is a personal opinion rather than for any technical reason. The site is fairly easy to navigate as it has the traditional text menu at the top right hand side of the page. This is just underneath the contact information for the company.
One of the pages of the site lists the prices for a years hosting and site maintenance with cinema hosting when compared to another hosting site, and it is here that you can see the difference in prices between the two. On the one hand the prices which are quoted seem high for the hosting and general maintenance of the site as all the sites will be using the same backend servers and templates. There is a whole section of the site dedicated to the templates which are available to look at. There are 14 different site templates which are available to demo, although they seem pretty normal in terms of design.
For a company which is hosting sites for a large number of cinemas and who has a link in each of their footers I am surprised at how few cinemas are listed on the site – I would expect to find a list of all the cinemas who are their clients.
However, if you want a company to sort you out a website where you have very little work to do, but always is up to date then I guess this company is worth looking at as they specialise in our part of the business. As someone who runs their own website there are often times when I wish I could pay someone else to do some of the work involved in keeping it fresh and up to date for me. If I owned a cinema then I would be tempted by their service, I just don’t think the site necessarily does the web design justice.
If you would like Screentrade to review a particular website, please contact me directly on: webmaster@madcornishprojectionist.co.uk.
Download Times:
| Connection Rate | Download Time |
|---|---|
| 14.4K | 28.01 seconds |
| 28.8K | 15.01 seconds |
| 33.6K | 13.15 seconds |
| 56K | 8.69 seconds |
| ISDN 128K | 4.05 seconds |
| T1 1.44Mbps | 2.18 seconds |
Navigation: *****
Good Design: *****
Updates: ***
Content **
Download Speed: *****
Overall: ***
Overall: Technically there is nothing wrong with this website, but in terms of content and knowing which companies use the service the site is a bit of a let down. What makes this site interesting is really the service it offers not what’s on the site.
Testing Information: This site is tested using a laptop at 1024 x 768 resolution running Windows XP, Firefox Version 2.0.0.6 and Internet Explorer 7 over an 8Mb Broadband connection. The site is also now being tested on an Asus EEE PC. For the text only test Lynx on a Linux Server is used. A website entitled WebSiteOptimization.com is used to test the web site to calculate the download speeds.