At first glance, The Harrow Review looks like an amateur website featuring a few reviews on local pubs and restaurants. But once you have surfed around it for a while, it reveals itself as an ambitious project to give people living in Harrow anything from a local message board and discussion forum to online classifieds.
The website is pretty user friendly. The index page tells you what the site is about, and there are several blue links in a table on the left you can click on to take you to a noticeboard, classifieds and an events calendar. The "free for all" link allows you to create a link to your website from the Harrow Review. There is also a link to a chatroom.
A second table, below the one with the links taking you to those already mentioned, invites you to give Harrow restaurants, cafes, fish and chips and pubs a write-up and rating.
The pop-ups by advertisers, including one by the site itself that tells you to add it to your favourites are rather irritating.
The Harrow Review provides a skeleton the users of the site must put the flesh on to make it worthwhile. The only problem is, they don't. Hardly anyone seems to make use of the Harrow Review service. It's a pity this site has not been able to generate the critical mass necessary that could make it invaluable.
Visit it at http://www.hartney.co.uk
July 10, 2002 15:30
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