For a couple of weeks each year the whole world starts spelling October with “k” instead of “c” - that’s a good sign of Oktoberfest. And that in turn means beer fests all over the world - including TemplateMonster. Don’t get us wrong, we don’t drink while at work, but as a design company we are having our own beer fest. We have compiled a second part of world’s best beer-related websites (the first part of Best Beer Websites review was published earlier this year on St. Patrick’s Day). The today’s ones are mostly local websites of world’s top beer brands but that doesn’t mean these websites are less spectacular. Enjoy!
Please note: by reading this post you confirm that you are at least 18 years old and that you are aware of the drinking responsibility. TemplateMonster along with the review listing items (breweries) below in all ways advocates the drinking awareness terms and popularizes the responsible and moderate drinking.

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Brahma

Every beer website is meant to keep the audience involved - after all just showing off the nice beer bottles is no longer considered cool. This website keeps you involved with the nice and simple Flash application - you upload your photo and may see yourself next to Zeca Pagodinho - a famous Brazilian singer.

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BrewDog

That’s a British beer website and although U.K. is not traditionally considered a top brewing territory it still has its share - including the websites. This one has a grunge or punk style design - as well as the beer brand concept itself.

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As you previously know, Template Monster originally published a post entitled Ugliest Websites of World’s Top Hotels that caused a burst of comments both criticizing and encouraging. This fact couldn’t leave us indifferent, and consequently, we made Supersonic Redesign of the worst (in our opinion) hotel website – the website of the Hotel Goldener Baer in Vienna. For all that, we got even greater amount of feedbacks (many thanks for them), and what was truly exciting that one of the active participants of the dispute, mentioned above, drew a sketch depicting his own vision of a new design for Goldener Baer website. As we know, in any design, as well as in any web design, various approaches are possible. Thus and so, we invited Steven to complete his sketch and write a guest post on Template Monster’s blog to acquaint our readers with alternative (in relation to our) redesign variant.

It should be noted that our approach is in marked contrast to Steven’s. He initiated with logo and corporate style changes. We focused on a website, and intentionally didn’t make any logo modifications since it would have entailed the change of corporate style which is far expensive than simply website redesign. Through differential approaches, we cannot accede to Steven’s criticism of our variant, but we have concluded to leave the original text to let the readers decide whose approach and whose variant is better.

So gain a deep insight into what Steven Moseley has written:

“Although the original Hotel Goldener Baer website looks about 15 years outdated and poorly designed, it contains a visual language that speaks very directly to the “character” of the Hotel.

How so? The Goldener Baer is a historic structure – textural, rustic, quaint. Consequently, the hotel’s website is also very textural, rustic, and quaint – indeed, to a fault, but that’s beside the point. The site has “character”. We’ll get more into what that means later.

Although the Supersonic Redesign of the website is unarguably more professional and usable (vastly so), the character of the Gold Baer somehow got lost in translation.

The redesigned website no longer speaks a rustic, quaint language. Instead, it speaks a corporate language, with chamfered boxes, radiused corners on buttons, pastel green and blue colors, and soft gradients. The only real texture in the site is in the background, but it doesn’t “feel” old-world. Instead, it has the feeling of mid-20th century wallpaper (not the kind you put on your computer desktop – the kind you actually paste onto walls!) In the new site, the stone textures, gold highlights, and serif typography used in the old site are all gone – and along with them, all of the character that define the hotel.

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Since their very first days Flash-based website environments have been a matter of obsession for millions of Flash artists and graphic designers. Not long ago having a website with this sort of 3D-style environment has become really popular and that’s when we started seeing more and more websites of this kind. So now we present a collection of websites based on Flash environments - please welcome.

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SensiSoft

Since most of the websites of this kind are so creative for their navigation solutions this one can be called a typical one - it does have an original navigation solution.

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Zeroix

This one’s navigation may not be as awesome as with some of the others but it does have one of the most impressive graphics on this list (or maybe even the most impressive). All of the website’s elements are based on custom 3D models designed exclusively for this website - even the background. Not to mention the mini-game of website’s preloader.
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Today we’ve came up with a new review - this time it’s about the worst websites of hotels that are actually great. It’s hard to tell why they tolerate the designs like these - perhaps because they think they’ve done a good marketing job before and nothing can ever spoil their image. We’re sure there’s no need explain how wrong that position is. The websites in the list are arranged in direct proportion to how bad the design is and inversely to how famous the hotel is (so the worst website design of the best hotel would be #1 on the list). Anyways, time for some critique:

10. GoldBear Hotel

Ok, this one may not be the most famous hotel but it surely has the worst website design. It’s terribly outdated, the website layouts like this one were used back in 1990-s. As a matter of fact we even expected to see the photo of Jean-Claude Van Damme somewhere on this website and thought we’ve heard Vanilla Ice and East 17 singing in the background once we saw it all, after all that’d be quite easy to explain. On one hand since it’s not world’s #1 hotel it cannot afford a premium website, on the other hand - when you’re not on the top you have to do something to get there (including having a decent website).

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9. Hotel Opera

This hotel appears to be another fan of postcard-style (reminds me of the BlueHost.com website mentioned in the worst hosting websites post). It has absolutely unusable navigation menu and they seem to have used what we call a “chaotic” approach in arranging the images and functional clocks (not so functional after all). But hey - at least they have a Flash animation and a kick-ass favicon!
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Captain Revelation (as well as ourselves) has no rest since last Friday when we’ve discovered that so many of world’s top hosting companies neglect the importance of a website design. Think about it for a second: the companies providing websites and fighting for customers actually ignore their own corporate websites. Yeah, that is really something a design company like TemplateMonster may be worried about.

Take a look at a couple of hosting companies we are sure you all have heard of:

BlueHost.com

We don’t mean to be offensive, but this one kinda looks like these postcard-style websites popular back in late 1990s. And it seems to be optimized for what - 640 by 480 pixels screen resolution? In fact this design hasn’t been updated since 2003 - that’s a long time people! Time to do something about it!

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1and1.com Hosting

This one looks like a Christmas tree to us. It’s now that old though, that’s a good thing about it. However this kind of design approach does harm the functionality - it’s hard to navigate all these blocks.
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