Spanking Review

Bars & Stripes scored 22/50 on our mini-review of the free-site content and design. Fortunately this low initial score does not reflect on the quality of content in the members area.

Entering the members-area you find a clean menu and greetings area with dark-green background and red control buttons. A little too ‘Eddie Stobart’ for me, but effective as a branding exercise nonetheless. You are welcomed as a visiting prison Governor
The menu on the left hand side of the page divides the site into the following areas:

• Navigation
• Home
• Latest News
• Inmates
• Matron
• Updates
• Prison Diaries
• Suggestion Box
• Contact Us
• Prison Area
• Governor’s Office
• Cell Block
• Intake Office
• Solitary
• Sick Bay
• Interview/Visiting
• Prison Grounds
• PT room
• On the Outside
• Governor’s House
• At Large

The first thing that ‘hits’ you at Sound Punishment is the bright red background to the page. Now I know this is popular with lots of spanking sites but I just feel that someone who has put together such a top class site could have done something a little different.

At the top of the page we have a clear menu which allows easy navigation around the site, including access to a spanking personal ads area and a professional-looking helpdesk system. As this page indicates that the site is updated weekly, it may have been better if this were reinforced on the scrolling list of updates which tops the first page of the tour.
Hitting on any of the top three images on the index page will take you to the first tour page, I would maybe have liked something more here, perhaps a video or a larger picture. There is a free video however on the site’s index page and I have to say I was very surprised by the quality. With so many web sites still insisting on giving poor quality video clips in the free area and then trying to tell us that the quality in the members area will be better, I am delighted when someone says, ‘look at this. Its free and its top quality and that’s what you get’.

I had just read the text telling us about the site and learnt that it is run by a husband and wife team and, maybe unfairly, I was expecting to see something a little more, well not quite up to the mark but as I say, a top quality video sample, right on the front page, that gets me interested.

Passing quickly over the rest of the first tour page text, it does go on a bit, we have the scroll down list of past updates, as I said I would have liked to have seen them dated but that is just a small niggle. There are a couple of places to click through to the join page from here so no complaints there, clear and to the point. This page seems to be all about updates so we skip quickly onto the next section of the tour and find six high resolution video clips. These are all around 4meg each so the site is obviously aimed at broadband users and why not I say.

I must say this reviewer was a little disappointed when going onto Shanelle’s spanking site to see that the lady with one of the most spankable bottoms in the UK has now started to assert her more dominant self, there are however plenty of images and video clips in the free area of the site to wet the appetite and go part of the way towards appeasing my desire to see her spanked one final time for daring to deprive the rest of us of this most spankable of derrières. But. onto the site itself.

First impressions are of a site put together by amateur enthusiasts trying to get a message across and maybe doing too much of everything in the process. The background to the pages is messy, like a bad wallpaper job in your sitting room, this tends to detract from the text and pictures. The menu buttons are again a little obtrusive and just ad to the impression of untidiness, too many ideas not executed as well as they could be.

There is a fast changing animated gif on the first page, I always find these things distracting and in this case doubly so as it leads to a chat, message system heavily populated by adverts for insurance and other money making sites. Yes I know that I should have followed the menu tour button but seeing this flashing picture thing there just distracted me, it may also distract others who are looking to see some great spanking pictures and leave them thinking that it might not be worth the trouble, and that would be a pity.

Going further down the page we find a series of pictures at quite low resolution advertising the latest update, these would have been better placed at the top of the page maybe, as you won’t see them till you have passed below the large menu, extra text and the flashing gif. Going even further down the page we are offered the chance to join a Yahoo group. Now call me old fashioned but I think when someone has taken the trouble to find a particular web site from the thousands on offer, started to explore it and got past the inducements to buy a new ipod or whatever banner is showing in the chat area the last thing you want to do is to send them away from the site to the sad morass that is the motley collection of spanking sites that have not yet been culled by the Yahoo thought police.

Bars and Stripes is a new site on the British Spanking scene starring some of the best female spankees in the business such as Leia Woods, Kara Jayne, Emma Brown, Amy Hunter, Adele Haze, Niki Flynn, Gina Moon, Dublin O’Brien … the list goes on and on.
Set in a fictional women’s correctional facility, it tries to portray how most red-blooded males would want a female prison to be run.

After the almost obligatory ‘RU 18?’ entrance page the site opens onto a graphics-rich page. The header of the page incorporates an animated gif file of a rather rapid spanking which, though eye-catching, will slow the page loading for people viewing it on slower connections.

As you progress down the page some large thumbnails of the latest content are shown, all of which link to the JOIN NOW page and not to any enlargements of the images. A scrolling message box is used to display site news.

A link to a Preview Clip is next. This takes you away from the site and opens a download window. It would have been better to have set up this link so as to keep you on the site. The sample is in WMV format, 4.92 Mb in size, 1min 10sec in length, 352×288 pixels encoded at 700 kB/sec. The quality is good, the clip comprising of video sections interspersed with still images. This is the only downloadable content on this page.
The table below that box shows the updates to the sites with dates, whether they were an image update of a video update. Clicking on the associated images just takes you the Join Now page again.

Disciplinarian is a site dedicated to schoolgirls in school uniform and the punishments they receive. The site claims to update with quality photos three time a week. This site is part of a portfolio of sites which include Regulation Knickers and other sites.

The free Tour links takes you via 5 pages of on-page images (none of them expandable – only using ‘right-click and save’ can store them on your computer). All the images link directly to the Join Now page. The image quality appears to be good and studio lighting appears to have been used.The movie downloads pages show 24 thumbnails which link to individual sales pages, each with three small images (framegrabs?) and an embedded WMV view of rather small size. You are then invited to buy the film in approximately 10 minute segments at $15 per segment = $45 a film! The film viewer on the page did not work in FireFox browser but worked correctly in Internet Explorer.

The film samples are of mediocre technical quality, 30 seconds in length and non-downloadable, but the spanking and caning action was real and set in both domestic and a realistic school set. Wihout being able to see the full size films I cannot say what the product sold to members would be like, whether the films are downloadable for later viewing or whether only online streaming viewing is possible. If the latter then it is important to be sure that they will work in your browser and that you have a fast enough broadband link.
From what I have read on the site, the Members Area comprises only 100 galleries of schoolgirls in uniform being punished. There is no mention of any videos in the members area. With membership at $29.95 per month and $60.00 for 3 months (with no information as to whether these are recurring or non-recurring billing) this site appears very expensive when compared to others on the market which have extensive video as well as photo libraries for their members.