Ladbrokes

Ladbrokes.com maintains an appearance that will be familiar to those who know the Ladbrokes brand from the high street, with the same colors and overall look and feel as the bricks and mortar bookmakers. The services offered are also the same, with a wide variety of sporting events to bet on.

The site is a little cramped, with lots of scrolling frames where they have tried to fit in too much information in one go – the fixtures list is massive, and the 'quick menu' at the top of the screen scrolls too much for my liking, making it difficult to find what you want to do. There is a betting slip on the right hand side of the screen which can be collapsed to allow you to read the page, but still gets in the way.

Like other sites, they offer a betting calculator, but instead of plugging in the information as you go, you have to select the kind of bet – the bets are called by common names (Heinz, Yankee, Patent, Trixie), which may not be familiar to everyone – if you usually spend a lot of time on other sites with a more international membership then the calculator my be more of an inconvenience than an aid. The interface is also less professional looking than I had expected for such a brand.

One good thing about the site is the mobile interface – it is cleaner and tidier than the web interface, and acceptably fast too. You can use the same account across both sections of the site.

The financials section is something that some bookmakers do not offer – if you are interested in betting on financial markets then this may appeal to you, however there are many specialist web sites that offer the same kind of thing.

The Lotto section offers you the chance to play many foreign lotteries, including the Irish and Spanish lotto games – while lotteries are always just 'a bit of fun', and not something you can play mathematically, the lottos offered here make much more sense than the UK National Lottery when you consider the chance you have of winning even a smaller prize.

Ladbrokes offer less incentive for new members, and the navigation and layout of the sight is cluttered and annoying compared to similar sites such as Betfair. If you are a person loyal to the Ladbrokes brand from your days of high street sports betting, or someone who is mostly interested in the other features of the site – such as the Lotteries, then it is worth using, but for most other bettors, the web specialists seem a better option than the high-street names.