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Content
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| Quality : |
17.0 / 20 |
| Quantity : |
12.5 / 15 |
| Entertain : |
13.0 / 15 |
| Updates : |
9.0 / 10 |
| Exclusive : |
5.0 / 05 |
| Download : |
3.0 / 05 |
| sub-total : |
59.5 / 70 |
| Navigation |
| Easy : |
8.0 / 10 |
| Features : |
3.5 / 05 |
| Design : |
3.0 / 05 |
| sub-total : |
14.5 / 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. Content looks pretty good.
2. Updates come often.
3. All exclusive material.
1. More videos would be nice.
2. Quality could be even better.
3. Content seems to be rotated out.
"A very nice collection of content, though I wish they didn't take old material off." |
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What a nice, calm sounding name for something so decidedly not calm: Restrained Elegance. The images the name conjures up in my mind are hot, hot chicks, tied and bound but with some awesome lighting and photography. That's a lot to live up to just by the name of a site! The tour is a little simple for my liking, with no real graphics or anything to keep the mood going. To join, it'll cost you $30 for the first month, and then $23 for each month after that you decide to stick around.
The member's area looks almost identical to the tour, so get used to it if you're not a fan :) The splash page is a bit long, but that's from the blog-type entries the webmaster writes a few times a month. Click through to their index, and you have another very long page, but this one is full of updates. There's only one per row, and only about two and a half updates show per page for me, so there's way too much scrolling needed here. However, updates come daily (sometimes even twice a day), so as you can imagine there's a lot to see here.
Photos and videos are not separated from each other, and there's no other option to browse the site differently, so you're stuck scrolling (and scrolling, and scrolling) through everything to find what you like. There's a zip file linked straight from the main page if that's your preference, otherwise you can click through to a pretty standard gallery page (though it looks quite amateur to me). Thankfully, all the troubles are worth it because the content looks about as good as expected. Images are a decent size at 1024x680 or so (depending on the crop). Unique, colorful outfits and lighting are used to create some nice-looking galleries for sure. Image quality is good as well overall, which rounds everything out here.
Look around closely to find a video or two to watch (there aren't nearly as many as there are photos), and you're presented with three viewing options: two Real Video files and a Windows Media Video as well. However, more bad news comes when you find that all three are in a zip file, so you're stuck download them fully beforehand (and they came quite slowly for me unfortunately - about 1/4 of our connection's top speed). On top of that, download accelerators don't work here either, so you'll just have to wait (a 30MB download is taking about three minutes for me right now). Thankfully, again, they're worth it at 640x480 and 800kbps (WMV) or 1000kbps (Real) which look quite nice in the end. Overall, I'd like to just see more videos, and of course get rid of the silly zip file thing.
The content here is quite nice, which definitely makes it worth a look. The site itself could use the benefit of an upgrade all around, both in looks and feel, and in navigation and options. The website is really holding back the content, which could be getting mid-high 80's scores by my guess. Once that's fixed, I think it'll be a great site for fans of the genre.
| 1st Follow-Up Review |
Review: 08-20-06 |
There have been some nice navigational changes to help make getting around the site a bit easier than before. They broke videos out into their own section which is awesome. They also broke some extra large pages down into smaller ones which helps too. Also, videos can usually be played right away (and not put into zip files as they were before) which makes the videos much more easy to get through.
The growth hasn't changed much since they obviously rotate old content out, but unless they change their whole system there's not much hope there. Otherwise, the content still looks good and I think you'll have a good time here. The changes are appreciated, and I'd love for them to contiue the tradition and keep improving the site.
Score decreased from 82.1 to 81.0.
| 2nd Follow-Up Review |
Review: 02-04-08 |
Restrained Elegance has continued to make their site navigation better since our last visit, which is definitely nice to see. They've added a model's index, and also a new search box I believe. The site may have grown a little bit, but they also may still rotate old content off (it's hard to tell). Otherwise, the price is a little higher these days up to $28 a month now. The content still looks good, though a slight upgrade to the quality wouldn't hurt either. Overall, I'm glad to see the changes continuing here!
Score increased from 81.0 to 82.5.
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