Erg

TYPE: riding

Erg is definitely one of the more interesting riding websites I've been to. For the most part, your typical, run-of-the-mill Angelfire-hosted riding sites are virtually identical: bland (or no) design, no real content, a couple blurry pictures of some dirt jumping and feeble grinds, and a links page that was copied directly from some other site (not checking to see that half the links were broken).

The site is contained in a short, wide pop-up window — right there much different from your average website. There's lots of impressive DHTML used on the site — pop-up windows, text scrollers, mouseovers — that are actually built into the design and used well, rather than using cool yet, in essense, useless effects just because they're cool.

The designs are very contemporary, kind of in the style partially introduced to the world by David Carson. This lends itself the main problem with the site: it's not easy to navigate it. You have to figure out your way around the site (such as the way past the first page are the tiny numbers on the left). There are no blue underlined links to show you the clear path, but that's part of what Erg is about: this ain't Yahoo.

I've seen "cool" sites that are impossible to figure out how to use...and once you do figure them out, it turns out that it wasn't worth it. Erg is by no means difficult to use — it's really just different. And there's stuff here worth seeing, most of it trails-related: photos, a couple stories, and a silly but neat short barspin animation. I hit several "coming soon" pages, which always kind of put me off (my belief is if it's not ready, don't provide a link to it yet), but on the whole Erg was a breath of fresh air in the world of riding sites.

» www.byke.com/erg/

Uploaded April 2000