Silk Road and Beyond http://www.silkroadandbeyond.co.uk/

1) Site does fit into my screen :) that's good. General outlook is good, they have a map of Central Asia at http://www.silkroadandbeyond.co.uk/central-asia.html and they cover pretty much all countries in Central Asia








2) My main complain is about menu. See the image on the left for details of what i mean. I have to say that i browse sites in mozilla firefox and it turns out that sometimes sites are well done for IE but not doublechecked in mozilla. It might be the case with this site. I have hard time browsing the menu. Sometimes the down menu hides behind the picture trailor (see next pic on the left). Sometimes i point on link and menu falls perfectly well, yet i try to point on submenu and it dissappears.













3) Title - it reads Escorted tours in Central Asia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. For an unfamiliar person it might seem like Central Asia is a seperate country. So it might be more proper to have title read as Central Asia: Uzbekistan... etc. Also if it includes only three countries in Central Asia why do we have Mongolia and Pakistan there on the map? They also have Turkmenistan and Tajikistan but they fit into CA countries.

4) Tours - There are two tours with the name: Silk Road Cities Of Uzbekistan 11 Days. It turns out that one is a group tour and one is private. When i went to the pages of these tours i faced another problem - roller on the right of my screen did not appear even though the page is bigger than my screen, so i can't go down the page. Same thing is with every other tours pages. The problem dissappears in IE, so just like i thought website is not optimized for firefox. Also when you are on the page of Central Asia you can see all central asian tours on the left, but when you move to any tour on the left you find a longer list of tours, which are actually not tours to CA but i presume all other tours to other destinations. Plus in IE this list of tours for whatever reason stops at some point and one can't reach other tours. So site is not very well optimized for IE as well.

5) Navigation - when entering main page for CA there is a great section called "Places in Central Asia" but it dissappears when entering specific tour page, which i think it shouldn't do for many users want to read this info and coming back is not the best thing to do.

6) Silk Road Cities Of Uzbekistan 11 Days tour in the title has Silk Road Cities of Uzbekistan 10
I also compared this tour to Lost Silk Road Cities 12 Days and the only difference is that last tour has four days of Turkmenistan. I am not quite sure but it appears that Tashkent, Khiva, Urgench, Ashhabat, Merv, Bukhara, Samarkand and Shahrizabz (want to say London :) ) are lost cities of silk road. Why are they lost?

7) Mountains and minarets tour in my opinion has to do with Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. First is the country of mountains and second is the country of minarets for sure. But this tour will lead you to Kazakhstan and its canyons! and to Kyrgyzstan with one minaret - Burana tower and two city tours - Bishkek and Alamty, which are actually one of the youngest cities in Central Asia - about 200 years. Yes, there were some settlements there and silk road did go through them but Samarkand and Bukhara are more ancient (see website's comment for proper background below).

An exciting tour combining ancient Silk Road cities with stunning mountain scenery. There are opportunities for gentle walks or more adventurous hiking depending on your preferences. Some accommodation is basic.

8) Search - i tried the search by following criteria - Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan, Trian Journeys, January - now i know the result would be ZERO. But i found it very funny to have in search box the option of "Train Journey" after i have chosen Kyrgyztsan as my travel country. And my other attempt to search anything failed because i had chosen two criteria at a time.

My grade - 4 out of 5