Welcome back to my series "SharePoint Site Highlight", where we examine websites that you may not have known were driven by SharePoint, hosted by Apps4Rent or otherwise. We also take a look at how those sites are built visually and give them a review based on the findings.

Last time we looked at Cadbury, but this time, it's all about the speed. Brace yourselves as we go from zero to flat-out in a matter of seconds with Ferrari! Yes, you guessed it; Ferrari's website is driven by SharePoint.

Ferrari's site opens on a nice clean landing page that only gives you the language choice of Italian or English. Since I'm not smart enough to speak Italian also, I can only talk about the English version.

The color scheme is very "racy", being shades of graphite and red, with the Ferrari logo displayed proudly in the left uppermost corner. The red background assures that our eye is drawn to the logo. Good marketing, guys!

After clicking on "English" and allowing the main site to load, the first thing I notice after the page loads, is the fact that ALL the content for the home page is designed to fit on the screen without scrolling. Most designers ignore this rule of thumb, so Ferrari's SharePoint site gets extra points from the start.

The navigation, although slightly confusing, is very attractively built using animated drop-down menus. This is not really considered best practice, because the user shouldn't be forced to hover their mouse to get to information. All navigation should be available from the start.

I just can't bring myself to be too upset, because the drop-downs are so neat! They incorporate pictures of the line of Ferrari racecars, racetracks, and other awesome things to look at. If they don't drive you with a good sales pitch, they will do it with exciting pictures.

Other pages on the site keep with the general theme and provide consistency for your visiting experience. When you drill down in other pages, a second navigation bar appears under the first, making getting around even more confusing.

All in all, Ferrari's SharePoint site is definitely worth checking out. They would have received 5 out of 5 stars from this review if it weren't for the navigation no-no's, so their score is reduced to 4 out of 5 stars. Still a score worth having!

Check in with us next time, and who knows, the SharePoint hosting site we are checking out could be yours!

Adrian Gates (Adrian@apps4rent.com) is a Business Manager with Apps4Rent ( http://www.apps4rent.com/sharepoint.html ); which offers premium Reseller  hosted Exchange, Microsoft Hosted SharePoint Services and Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services.