Website of the Week – The Planet

http://www.the-planet.co.uk/

This week’s website is the Telegraph‘s travel page, The Planet. There is a rather splendid schism on this site between the high quality writing by which it is characterised, and the particularly poor design which it features. Once you have gone beyond the deceptively impressive title page, this week featuring an eerie great white shark and various planetary backgrounds, the calibre of the design goes into steep decline.

Design aside for the moment though, the actual content of the site is superb. Included are a range of features, guides and travel accounts which are updated each week, along with an online database containing a huge volume of travel information and holiday reports. What you, like I, might find so appealing about it is the fact that all the accounts of travels are written in diary style, which not only makes one feel closer to the whole experience, but some of them are also very funny. Even somewhere as obscure and dull as Fakenham (in Norfolk, for those of you that don’t know) is given a brilliant sheen by Daisy Waugh’s account. There is also an element of continuity with Martin Buckley sending weekly accounts of his travels in the form of ‘Notes from a Nomad’.

The design of most of the pages accessible from the title page is so bland that it does not even deserve a mention, and is really the only stumbling block of this site. The quality of the writing does much to make up for what is lacking in the design department. The links quite literally take you anywhere you might wish to go, no matter how subversive the location, and there’s a variety of travel accounts on most regions as well as information about flights and the like.

This is a site where content most certainly triumphs over style, and is well worth a visit for coach-potatoes and hobos one and all.

Reviewer: Deborah Bonello