Skyrocket.be

Boltfolio.com is another one of those online community sites which features alot of nice extra’s for some of us. Created by Bolt Media, a company based in New York and specialised in websites for today’s youth. So that makes it clear which audience they are targetting with boltfolio. And that is where my first point of critique comes up. The site is too simple. From an accessibility point of view it’s damn hard to distinguish the different sections of the page, aligning the sidebar menu’s and other elements in visual containers would have helped alot.

Anyway, i went on registering and that went pretty smooth, nothing to complaint here. After activating my account they asked for all kinds of information like your home address, your bio, your status, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc … but you can just skip that part and get to uploading right away. The uploading of picture and video went fairly smooth, you can upload multiple files at once and label them individually afterwards. Nothing to comment on that, works like it should.

Personally i found navigating someone boltfolio not that easy, certainly if it contains alot of photo’s, video’s or audioclips. Smaller thumbnails would have helped alot. I would prefer something in between the size of tumbnails they use on your personal boltfolio page and those on your album page. Once on the detailpage of a photo though, the photostream navigation works good, but we know it works good as Flickr already uses this kind of navigation.

Last but not least i want to comment on the implementation of Ajax on the site. Boltfolio uses Ajax to manage item sets, add tags to assets, etc … Nice implementation, but when i hit the view-souce button something blew me off my feet. The site still uses table cells for site layout!!! I forgive them for this as they are still being in beta but please … if you implement Ajax, use CSS as layout method and make sure you have a proper DOM to work with. Don’t just slap up some tables for layout and start adding Ajax features to make it look fancy.

Overall Boltfolio has some nice features but some things really bother me and refrain me from considering to use this site regularly. Maybe they will fix several of the things i discussed above when the site leaves it’s beta phase but as with many other projects this site doesn’t feel like beta (What are google ads doing in a beta?).