Hard Glam

The main members' page is looks quite similar in design to the tour. They kept the black and purple color-scheme, even the site statistics and models menu. The major difference, however, is in the middle of the page. The come-on adds and teaser material are replaced with links to those 14 sites I mentioned earlier.

A closer look at the list tells Hard Glam is quite clearly that they're aiming for fetishes and niches that nicely fit within the cozy confines of what is known as "Glam." For instance, I noticed several foot and leg sites — primarily stocking and nylon fetish ones. There are also a few pantyhose and smoking sites, too. And what cos-play site doesn't have at least a set or two including decadent dress?

Finding your way around this joint is a breeze. Most network sites out there seem to have that cookie-cutter look and feel, like they just came off an assembly line of burnt out web designers. You know the types, riddled with buttons and banners and unnecessary browsing-aids. The setup here, though, is quite simple. There's one menu at the top of the page, and it contains all the basics: Help, Bookmark, POTD(Picture of the Day) DVDS, Contact Us. There are a couple of drop-down menus for browsing by model and niche, but other than that, they keep it simple with the main page acting merely as a gateway.

Clicking the site of your choice will simply fill the middle of the page with that site's content. They have near-identical layouts and video and picture quality, and share a setup that, while a little ugly, I find to be quite handy. They list all of the site's content down the middle of the page. The only thing I don't like about this, is that you can only display 4 video and picture sets at a time, but I guess they wanted to limit page size.

I checked out the videos first. There are 433 in total. They can be streamed, in a moderate-sized embedded flash player. The player went off without a hitch, and I experienced zero buffering hiccups despite my efforts. Direct downloads come in the Windows Media format in both a Standard and High-Definition quality. The standard format was more than passable, and the HD video was absolutely superb. The resolution exceeded my expectations, as did the encoding. It's really a shame they watermarked it, with block letters, no less! The only other thing that I found troubling was that some videos are split up into a series of smaller clips with no full-length option.

To be honest, I wasn't expecting a whole lot going into the picture galleries. Perhaps after seeing the way the sites were setup, I was a bit prejudice. Perhaps that was for the best, however, because I got one hell of a surprise. You're given your choice between low and high-res JPEG file. I expected screen caps, at least for the low-res option, but even those could pass for mid-level pics at another site. Better yet, the high-res photos looked awesome, with an average width of 2,100 pixels!