London Phoenix home page
I’d like to applaud the redesign of the London Phoenix Cycle Club. The visual design is really bold and striking, the blog is packed with content, it’s got an embedded Google calendar with events up to May ‘09, a forum - is there a better bike club website in the UK?
More on the bike blog.
As a cyclist who regularly fritters away his surplus cash on cycle ‘accessories’, I quite like Wiggle - or at least when they’re cheaper than top-dog Chain Reaction Cycles. Recently, however, their wasteful packaging has put me right off. Check this out:
Wiggle package arrives. Cue oohs and aahs around the office.
The package looks empty, but wait...
The true scandal revealed.
Four replacement Campagnolo Veloce brake blocks in a box that could have contained 400 of them. Run out of Jiffy bags Wiggle?
By now you ought to know that I love cycling and bikes. I’m also pretty keen on web design. So when a bike manufacturer I really like gets a new website, I’m excited.
Condor Cycles, the iconic London bike builder, race team and brand name, had a ‘coming soon’ holding page on its site for most of 2007 - for so long, in fact, that I almost got in touch to offer my services. But I just checked back, and they’ve relaunched!
Here are some of the things wrong with the site:
So why use Flash, really? Can it be easy for Condor staff to update details in their catalogue? No - there’s no product database feeding into the site. In 2009 when their new bikes are launched, they’ll have to start over.
What Condor needs, to do justice to their excellent store, solid reputation and superb bikes, is:
Wilier Mortirolo Veloce 2007
The above is a new arrival to the strangerpixel cycle stable. Sweet, awesome - these don’t cover it. Compared to my Scott Expert (01?), this bike is like a rocket: quick, flickable, stiff under pressure, compliant over rough surfaces, sure on the descents. Classy. It turns heads.
When I test rode the Wilier about a fortnight ago, the unexpected feeling of power and speed on a climb were better than a year’s supply of Floyd Landis’s testosterone patches. It was so exciting I nearly burst a lung firing up Rosslyn Hill.
I pondered the Wilier’s rivals: efficient German engineering in the shape of the Focus Cayo on the one hand, on the other the undeniable quality of the US bike giant Trek. But I came back, remembering that first acceleration.
