You’d think Cher.com would be the end-all-be-all of Cher sites. Alas…no. If you’re a Cher fan looking for a comprehensive site or fan-made trades, visit the awesomely-obsessed fan sites instead. I’d love to review them all right away. So much time, energy and luv went into them. Some are flashy, some are stylish and some are a bit busy.
I’ll start with CherWorld (www.cherworld.com) for this reason: besides Google searches and Wikipedia, most of my www.cherscholar.com visitors come from Cher World. Enough said. CherWorld loves Cher because she continues to "raise eyebrows." This site definitely captures Cher’s variety, outrageousness and fashion.
Site strengths
- Most up-to-date news items – posted frequently
- Active forums – today someone posted a picture of a Cher-themed pumpkin. Forum topics include general chat, albums, movies, live concerts, collectibles, photos, letters to Cher, games and an off-topic section.
- Song downloads – remixes and rare songs like "Love is in the Air"
- Video downloads – rare videos like Cher’s performance at the U.S. Superbowl and British TV appearances
- Comprehensive, alphabetical song lyrics
- Fan store with a calendar, photos, a Cher crystal and Cher-autographed items (nice but too expensive for me)
- Organized photo galleries
- Colorful, fan-submitted wallpapers
- E-cards! We love ’em! Some hilarious flash cards!
- Small preview areas of Cher products from Allposters.com and ebay.com to get your Cher collection started
- It’s a robust site – I don’t see a lot of error messages or broken links
- Has a wonderful link list of other Cher sites that lead lots of visitors to www.cherscholar.com!
Room for Improvement
- I can’t decide if the layout is a little loud and busy or exciting and active.
- Whoops…some spelling errors. No biggie. You can find those here, too.
- Comprehensive singles and albums list with chart information – but which country’s chart is it? I’m not sure.
- Why do I need Cher email? I’m not sure about that either. Or a Guestbook.
- Login can be confusing as there’s a different login for your email and the forum. I got my passwords confused and it took a half an hour to sort it all out with an email reminder. Also, your password is very complicated and I can’t see where to change it to something simple.
- It’s hard to find the most current forum posts because you can’t sort the list by date.
- There’s an outdated Tour link (it does have the European tour date list, though) and a Library link that forwards you to a News archive.
- The Films list is missing a few movies.
I haven’t explored the Fan area much. There’s an online chat there and a profile you can fill out. CherWorld promises to send your profile to Cher.
Overall, the site is tip-top, one of the best Cher sites out there and it has the fanbase to prove it. Behind Cher.com, imdb.com and Wikipedia, Google ranks CherWorld next in popularity. It’s the highest ranked fan site. You may need the shockwave plug-in available on the site to view all the features. You can also sign up to the mailing list. I did and I’m looking forward to my first e-mail. Stay tuned. I may not be getting Official Cher Fanclub e-mail; but soon I’ll be getting CherWorld email. Whoo-hoo! I’ll take it!
Yeah, and Cherworld regularly gets HACKED every few months or so.