excite.co.uk

Being a new user of Excite’s free e-mail service I thought it worthy of writing an opinion on Excite.com, itself.

Covering all aspects of Excite is not an easy task since they do just about everything and one look at their homepage tells it all.

Unlike other companies such as Virgin, Excite have not monopolized each product or service, with their own affiliate or associate companies, and thus arises the important difference. The realization of a competitive and informative service.

It would be almost impossible to cover every aspect of Excite’s services and if I did try this opinion would go on forever. I therefore would again like to concentrate on the main attractions of this site.

Anyone can become a member of Excite. The registration is free and the process is very simple and not time consuming.

The main links are available in the center of the homepage and some of the important and useful ones the are:

Computers
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This area covers:
--Free downloads
--A listing of books related to computers
-- Internet resources, which provides links for graphics, tools, software and the likes.
--Computer resources, which provides links to companies specializing in computers, computer related products, computer related publications and jobs available in the computer industry
--Internet Café Locator. This I find very useful. Simply enter your town or postcode and presto, you get a full listing of Internet Cafes closest to your area.

Entertainment & Music
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This is a very large content area and cover:
--Links, on the left hand side, to: Arts & Leisure, Books, Eating out, Events, Jokes, Live Web Events, Lottery & Betting, Movies, Music, Mp3, Theater, Trivia, TV, Video & DVD and Photo Gallery. All of these links provide comprehensive coverage of the item selected.
--Links for other Web Sites providing Arts, Celebrities, Films & TV, Games, Humour & Music.
--Links for books related to entertainment and Music.
--Links for the latest Entertainment news
--Links for latest Celebrity Hot Gossip & News
--Links for the latest Show Biz News
--Restaurant Finder. Another very useful tool. Simply enter your location and postcode and you will have a list of featured restaurants in your area. I would suggest that if they are featured on Excite they should be pretty good.

Jobs & Careers
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A very interesting area for those seeking jobs, or for improvement of your existing skills. The areas covered on this page are:
--Advice Center. Provides useful advice on all matters related to job searching.
--Salary Checker. Here you can check your potential salary for a particular job and hours worked.
--Links to independent web sites related sites to this section.
--Job Search
--Featured Employers. This gives you a few prominent companies and job availabilities with them.
--Employment Law. Links to articles and web sites related to this aspect.
--Find A Job. Probably the most important area. This provides links for employment opportunities in specific areas i.e. Finance/Accounting, Public Sector, Sales/Marketing etc etc.

Mobile & WAP
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As the name suggest this area specializes in mobile and WAP phones. There is plenty of useful information and free stuff here. Some of the useful sections covered are:

--Free Downloads. Plenty of free downloads of many things such as software etc.
--Excite Mobile. Download from a lovely selection of Animal, Eyes and Cartoon Icons. Also download Ringtones. Some of the present favourites listed are: Eastenders, Flintstones and the UK Top 10.
--Get a New Mobile Phone. Special offers on mobile phones. Probably some of the best offers around today are available here.

Sport
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This area has comprehensive coverage of all the latest sport news. I would also go as far as saying that this even rivals specialized sport sites such as ESPN & Sky Sports. Some of the sections covered are:
--Barclaycard Premiership. This gives you the latest table situation in the Premiership at one quick and easy glance.
--Top Stories. Provides many links for all the latest top sport stories. This appears to be very updated.
--Breaking News. As the name suggests. Again the latest breaking sport news. Interviews and the likes are all featured here.

The other main links, which I have not elaborated on, are: Lifestyle & Women, Money & Investing, Motoring, News and Travel. All of these are also very well laid out and extremely useful provided unbiased information.

Excite’s free e-mail service competes well with other prominent players in this area. They provide you with 3 MB storage or 1000 messages (whichever is achieved first). That is pretty useful and surpasses that of Hotmail. The e-mail service is also very easy to use and provides the standard security features.

Then there’s the famous Excite Chat Rooms. A very wide variety to choose from. Whenever you access this page you can see how many people are present in each chat room. This enables you to make a time saving selection because each Chat Room page does take a little while to load.

Finally you can set your own personal Weather settings depending on the city your in. You can select the type of news you would like to receive on your personal page. Select your own Stocks & Shares that you would like information on. This personalized information will always be updated once you log on to the page. This saves you time and effort in trying to obtain each bit of information separately from different websites.

As stated earlier, there are so many other useful areas that I cannot cover in this opinion. Once you become a free member you will surely find other areas that might interest or be useful to you.

Overall I have been impressed with Excite and have now opened my free e-mail account with them. I have also set Excite as my Start Page and I intend to leave it like that for some time to come.