General
I’ve got to admit that I was immediately impressed when I landed on the site. Something about it gave me a confidence that it was going to be a good surfing experience and, more importantly, a good review.

This is the official website of erotic photographer Ryder Aedan Perry. To be fair, I hadn’t heard of him before either. However, from reading through various pages on the site (the about page in particular) he gave off a very good impression. The guy has a clear direction in what he is doing with Torrid Art and it is shown by the fact that the site is extremely well thought out in terms of functionality and is littered with useful features without being detrimental to the site design.

Before you even login, you are able to navigate the majority of the site and get a great feel of how it flows. I love this open tour approach as it means that potential members can see what they’re going to get before they join up, and can then have no complaints about being mislead. There is also no mistaking whether you’re logged in or not because it tells you on the page and the background colour changes.

Navigation is so easy. Support links etc are at the top of the page but separate from the main navigation. The main navigation is kept for just content related sections: Updates, Models, Articles and Blogs.

The updates page is nice and simple with the top of the page previewing the next two updates and showing a large preview of the most recent gallery. After that, the latest handful of sets are previewed below. If you are looking for something a bit older then there are straight forward navigation links, on the left of the page, to any of the previous months’ content.

The model page then gives a simple A to Z listing of the models (including a nice sized thumb) which can be further filtered by hair colour or category. At the top of the page is a link to the featured model of the month.

The articles are written by a chap called Bryan Borra and are generally orientated around sex. Normally I am the type of guy to skim over articles because they are oft just pulled from somewhere else and spout off about the same old thing. However this is not the case here, these articles are written specifically for this site and Bryan clearly knows what he is talking about and, what’s even better, he actually knows how to write! I hate reading articles where I’m more concerned about typos than content. Just in case you are wondering, Bryan is a practicing sex therapist and is also a certified personal trainer so he knows his stuff.

Both Ryder and Bryan maintain blogs on the site, with Bryan being the more active, and thankfully they’re not just one liners saying how they went to the beach or whatever; Bryan’s actually seem more like erotic stories detailing the shenanigans he gets up to. RSS feeds are available and comments are encouraged. Yet again, these are well written and interesting to read.

The support is great: there is an FAQ which actually has good questions in it, feedback page/form, and a tips and rules section. The only thing that you could say is missing is live support but with this site I think that is unnecessary as I have faith that they actually respond by normal means quickly enough.

Content
All content on the site is original and exclusive to the site, which is frankly the way it should be and generally means that the webmasters are going to care more about their site.

This is a photography only site and this makes sense considering the ethos of the site. By this I mean that Torrid Art is more about eroticism that being graphic and pushing the boundaries of taste; as they put it, a website “can be a diverse, dynamic place, with erotic entertainment, information, stories, articles, blogs, and community”.

The model pages couldn’t be better. There is a well written description of the model, presumably written by Ryder, as well as some vital stats, and then a straight forward listing of the model’s content.

A brilliant feature that I haven’t seen elsewhere is that you can asked to be notified by email if a specific model has had new content added to the site, should you have taken a fancy to any particular model.

They also have a rating option for models which give you the impression that they actually decide which content to shoot based on the results, and you know what, I honestly believe that they listen to their members. The best part is that once you’ve voted for a model, it actually remembers that you have, so there can be no trying to fix it by voting for the same model a multiple number of times, which means the results are a genuine reflection of member opinion.

Video Section
There are no videos on the site.

Picture Galleries
The word erotic is perfect for describing the photos as, simply put, that is what they are. You look at the women in the pictures and you actually feel like it’s more personal on their part, and in turn on yours. There is no clichéd snarling or posing and it is all very tastefully presented and because of this it all feels a bit more real; these are women that you could actually see out and about on the street and you totally get that "girl next door" vibe.

The photos on the site come in a good range of resolutions: 400x600, 800x1200, 1333x2000 and 2667x4000. Obviously the largest of these is absolutely huge and will meet the needs of those of you out there with huge monitors or who have a desire for high resolutions.

The browsing of the galleries couldn’t be easier. Once you find a set you want, you can view an enlarged version of the "cover", download the varying zips or just browse the various resolution images. If you choose to just browse then the gallery opens in a new window which, and this is where the makers of the site have thought about it, allows you to browse while still providing the options to switch resolutions at any time or download the zip; keeping these links present is just another clever way that they have made the navigation easier and shows that they have thought about the surfing experience.

Updates
Updates are on Monday, Wednesday, Friday; which is frequent enough when considering the quality and the fee.