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Content
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| Quality : |
17.5 / 20 |
| Quantity : |
12.0 / 15 |
| Entertain : |
13.0 / 15 |
| Updates : |
10.0 / 10 |
| Exclusive : |
5.0 / 05 |
| Download : |
3.5 / 05 |
| sub-total : |
61.0 / 70 |
| Navigation |
| Easy : |
8.0 / 10 |
| Features : |
3.0 / 05 |
| Design : |
3.0 / 05 |
| sub-total : |
14.0 / 20 |
| Other |
| Originality : |
4.0 / 05 |
| Hard Facts : |
3.5 / 05 |
| sub-total : |
7.5 / 10 |
Scoring Criteria New
New Update!
As of Aug 15th, 07, price of a site is no longer factored into the overall score/rank. |
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1. Daily updates.
2. Original content.
3. Nice quality content.
4. Clean design.
1. Content rotated out.
"Great looking bondage content on a nice, clean website." |
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If there's one thing I've learned in my years of reviewing porn sites it's not to judge a book by its cover, or a site by its tour. If I let the plain design, broken links, and text laden preview area of Restrained Elegance keep me from looking inside, I would have missed some high quality original bondage content. Restrained Elegance features the photos of Hywel Phillips, photographer, webmaster, and bondage fan. When asked what makes Restrained Elegance different from other bondage sites, he responds that he likes to focus as much, if not more, on the submissive herself rather than just the submissive's situation. He likes to go beyond showing just whips and chains, instead focusing on the helpless beauty and raw emotion of his models.
In fact, it's very important to him that his models be beautiful and his photos look like the belong on the cover of Vogue, not like they were "thrown together in the back of an old shed." All of his models are, indeed, very good looking and he does all sorts of things to them...ties them up with scarves, ropes, or chains, uses nipple clamps and handcuffs on them, and paddles, whips, teases, tickes, and even shocks them. This isn't half assed bondage either. You'll find everything from "simple rope ties and elegant metal shackles that look almost like jewelry at first glance, through to extreme ultra-stringent shibari- or Japanese- style ropewebs, suspensions, hogties, strappados and heavy metal stocks and manacles." It's very sexy and very serious.
The plain design of the tour unfortunently continues into the member's area. However, although it isn't much to look at it is still basically functional. The Member's index contains a list of all photo and video updates from the last 100 days. A new gallery or movie is added daily. That is damn impressive for original content! After 100 days the content is removed from the index. These older sets reappear in the Archive section of the site which features four galleries each week. I'm really not a fan of rotating content out of a collection but at least the daily updates almost make up for it. Anyhow, back to the navigation of the site. I really think it would serve the webmaster well to spend a little time organizing the content better. A model index, categories, and at the very least the separation of galleries and videos is badly needed.
The collection contains 123 galleries for a total of approximately 12,000 photos. Each gallery also comes with a zip file for downloading. The pictures are nice sized at 1024x682 and quite sharp. The videos also look good. There are currently 35 movies up and they average around 5 minutes long a piece. Each video is available with three options, high and low quality Real Media and high quality Windows Media. I was a little annoyed to find that all three options come in zip files so you have to download them before you can watch them. However, I think you'll find it worth your while. The high quality versions of both formats look great. It's just a shame that such good looking content is held back by the site.
I really enjoyed the quality original photos and videos of Restrained Elegance and I just wish the site was a little more user-friendly. It lacks so many basic features that I've come to consider standard on better sites. The rotating out of content also hurts. However, with the daily updates of exclusive content in mind, I've got to cut them some slack. The cost of membership is fair at $30 for the first month and $23 for each additional month. Restrained Elegance is absolutely worth a look, I only wish it was set up a little differently so I could give it a higher score.
| 1st Follow-Up Review |
Review: 08-17-06 |
Seven months have passed since we last looked at Restrained Elegance and there is good news to report. To begin with, the site has had a complete redesign with all the old dead links removed. It is still simple but it is certainly easier on the eyes. They've also streamlined the navigation by separating the galleries and the videos. I'd still like to see more browse features like headshots on the model index and categories but this is a step in the right direction. I was also pleased to find that the videos are no longer stuck in zips. Now you can play them directly as wmvs and Real vids. The site hasn't really grown, obviously, because old content is still rotated out. There has been a slight change in that department, now a new archived gallery is added daily and it is online for a month, but I still would love to see the entire archived collection. There's a lot of great content here and I'd like to see all of it. Guess I'll have to keep checking back in the archive!
Score increased from 80.4 to 81.5.
| 2nd Follow-Up Review |
Review: 01-27-08 |
Restrained Elegance has gotten even easier to navigate since our last visit thanks to the addition of a model index and search box. Getting around this cleanly designed site is now quite easy. I really like what I see here. The content looks great and the whole set-up is user-friendly. The only negative to report is that since our initial review, the recurring price has increased to $28 a month. I'd still say that's is fair for a site that updates daily with original fetish content. Restrained Elegance has come a long way since our first look and I would certainly recommend it to all lovers of kinky, classy bondage.
Score increased from 81.5 to 83.5.
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