Every time I read one of the reviews here, I end up thinking the same thing: navigation between a page's reviews seems unnecessarily complex. I figured a bit of feedback might be helpful here.

Unless I'm being a complete and utter retard (which is always a distinct possibility in my case ), the only way to navigate through the pages of a review is through the navigation table at the top of each page. I have two (hopefully helpful) comments about this system.

The first is its position on the page. As it stands, its position at the top of each age is fine when the page is first viewed after loading. It's also fine for the intro page, as that doesn't tend to be particularly long.

However, for the pages in the body of the review, it's not so useful. To make it through a review from start to finish, you have to pick a page, read down it, and then scroll all the way to the top of the page in order to move on to the next one. Since there's plenty of detail in the guts of each review (good stuff!), the scroll back to the top if a pain.

The best way out of this I can think of would be to duplicate the same table at the bottom of the page. That way, once you're done reading the page you're on, there's a link to the next page right where you're alreay at.

My other comment is about the ordering of the table. Currently, the table is a 4x3 grid that's laid out like this:

It's nice and clean-looking, but the order of the table has always left me a bt puzzled.

OK, so for any given review you start at Intro. That's the obvious place to start, so it goes in the top-left. However, the order in which the remaining pages of the review isn't that obvious to me.

At first, because I thought that Design / Layout would be the next page that follows the initial intro, it seemed like the table should be followed by walking down each column to the bottom, then traversing to the next column and doing the same there. The resulting order seems to make sense, but eventually kinda breaks down:

1. Intro
2. Design / Layout
3. Connectivity / Extras
4. Testing Performance
5. Modes
6. Overall Impressions
   etc.

That order doesn't work as you reach Overall Impressions only halfway into the review, which obviously wasn't the intent.

I then tried working horizontally across each entry in a row, then moving down to the next row and traversing that. This also feels weird:

1. Intro
2. Testing / Performance
   etc.

This seems to go badly, as I haven't had a chance to read a thing about the camera before I get launched into a description of how well it takes photos. The lack of a run-up is a bit jarring.

Might I suggest that the table be reordered so that the horizontal method works a bit better? I was thinking along the lines of:

I'll bet that some would disagree with this particular ordering, but here's what I'm thinking. Hopefully there's method to this particular madness:

After the Intro, you start off with the Physical Tour of the camera. This makes sense )to me, at least) as the first thing a lot of people do with an object they pick up is look at it from all angles. From there, you move on to to the Design/Layout of the camera, which is further information on the physical aspects of the camera. The row is then rounded off by Components, which is more info on the camera as an object.

Moving down to the next row, we have Connectivity/Extras. I would have liked to put this on the first row as it's more physical stuff about the camera: where you plug camles in, that sort of thing. However, it doesn't fit in a 4x3 table, so I put it as the first item on the second row. After that, we have Modes, Control Options and Image Parameters. I put these alongside each other as they all talk about messing around in the menus and so forth.

Moving down to the last row, we have the guts of the review. We finally get to Testing/Performance. The rest of the camera has been talked about in great length before this point, and now we're getting to the meat: how well does it take pictures? After that, we follow up with Overall Impressions which is more review-type stuff: comparisons with other similar cameras and the Who's it For? sections are in there, and it feels right to put this here. Penultimately, we have the Conclusion of the review. This is the last page of the review proper, prior to the tables of facts and figures in Ratings/Specs.

Although this order doesn't read well when the table is traversed by column, I reckon it would feel much more intuitive than the current layout and would provide a strong hint that it should be followed horizontally.

Don't get me wrong - the reviews themselves are great. It's just that navigation seems a bit clunky and disjointed especially given the quality and depth of the pages themselves. If the two tweaks above were made, I reckon that they would read a lot more easily, and I'm hoping that these changes wouldn't need much in the way of work (although I don't know how the HTML for your pages is generated).

Alternatively you could just dump the whole review into one long page as at camcorderinfo.com, but like things being split up into relevant sub-pages, and besides...I bet you get more ad revenue from multiple pages.

Feel free to agree/disagree/throw rubbish at me.

P.S. Perhaps a feedback forum might be worthwhile, maybe with site feedback and review feedback sub-forums? That way, we won't have to spam suggestions into the wrong forum like I just did...

I think these are excellent suggestions! What I think is a shame is that there's no opportunity to see real world pictures from the review-camera, ones taken when the reviewer's gone out for a morning and really put it through its paces.

'About DCI' talks about being fun and carefree but the 'Testing/Performance' page, though useful to camera afficianados, isn't fun or carefree at all. There's an implicit assumption that accurate colour rendition is a good thing in a digicam (and it is more digicams than dSLRs here) but, actually, I don't think many users want that. Before her eyes went funny and she couldn't focus her camera any more, my mother used to love Kodak Gold (and shun Fuji Reala) film because she loved the rich, vibrant, saturated tones it offered. Presumably, a lot of happy snappers want the same from their digicams but the 'Testing/Performance' section, as it stands, doesn't reward them with that knowledge, certainly not upfront.

Instead, get that GreatgMacbeth colour chart. As an old-timer, I love the information that chart provides. But, even if they take the time to decipher it, does the 'everyday user who wants to have fun with their digital camera' know that this chart will: look substantially different depending on which web-browser they're using? look different on non-calibrated or badly calibrated monitors?

The other thing which I think needs looking at is the 'Handling' section. Despite the objective scientific rigour of 'Testing/Performance' section, this bit gets really subjective. I don't know why it is, but so many professional camera reviewers - on the net and in specialist magazines - seem to be men with big hands, preternaturally big hands sometimes. I'm glad that DigitalCameraInfo's reviewers don't, like so many others, make the assumption that a camera with small controls AND a feature set they find uninteresting is clearly intended for women or, even worse, 'ladies'. If they like the camera, then it's just a bit small :-)

However, there are a significant number of reviews here that offer the redundant advice that big-handed people might find, say, a 300g camera the size of a matchbox a little on the small side and, basically, leave it at that. The truth is, though, that, even if you have the thin, tapered fingers (you see, hand-size doesn't actually even come into play) that can press any camera button - no matter how small - with ease, some cameras will still handle better than others. Putting across these more detailed impressions - rather than simply admiting defeat at "It's too small for me and my oafish, sausage fingers" - will make DCI reviews streets ahead of the rest.

The solution? For 'Testing/Performance', real world (preferably downloadable) pictures taken by competent photographers, and impressionistic accounts of their qualities and limitations will make a positive difference to the quality of the review format.

For 'Handling', consider soliciting the views of dextrous reviewers who are comfortable operating the smallest of digicams in the first instance. In fact, it's the kind of section where more than one point of view would be really helpful: perhaps you'd consider farming out review cameras to your forum participants for additional opinion? :-)

My two-pence.

Hiding_Pup (for whom paws without opposable thumbs was never a handicap)