I have just taken out a year subscription to the premium content at Yoga Basics. I had always remembered it as having a solid, straight-forward design, solid content and bringing out a useful newsletter. But I did not come back regularly until now. As a paying customer, I see a lot more and I especially like the posture section. Tim Burgin has started a new series of posture photographs using a Flash photo applet and maintained stylistic consistency by using a clean, white background that removes any visual distractions. He also gives several angles on the pose so you get a three-dimensional image of the posture. The only drawback is that I cannot link directly to all the poses because most postures are in the premium section and/or in Flash. The standard version uses small format photographs, only 100 px by 100 px. A use of frames makes it hard to use direct links to those poses fully available publicly. In any case, finding a formula for financially supporting a valueable online service is tough so I can appreciate some of the web design and access decisions made. It's just $25 a year.

Another website worthy following to see how it develops is iHanuman.com. It calls itself "the monkey bridge between students, teachers and the ancient wisdom of yoga" and an "online community of yoga teachers dedicated to serving the yoga world." It has audio and video mini classes and interviews. It will have the YogaDancer Asana Index available once the owner recovers from a hosting switch. Yoga Dancer has had the widest collection of photos of asanas, but the quality is uneven. Among the teachers signed up in iHanuman.com are Erich Schiffmann, Suzie Hurley and Angela Farmer.

Labels: yoga_resource