If you haven’t used www.allmusic.com yet, you will eventually. It is an encyclopedia of Western pop, blues, jazz, and classical music. You can read there for days and days.
Sure, some complaints can be made about its content. Some of the articles are amateurish, some artists are damned with faint praise, etc. But, in general, it is excellent. Its classical music articles are especially impressive: you can easily look up the works of any composer by type, date, etc. Fantastic!
But for design and basic function, the site sucks total ass.
First, you have to register. This is pointless, as it usually is. But it’s especially pointless in this case as you need to “log on” not to read the site overall, but only to access certain features that are not really any different that other features of the site. Want to look at Billboard charts for an artist? Log on!
But don’t hit that “log on” button if you are in the middle of reading an article (and then want to access those extra features–you’ll be kicked back to the home page. If you open another window, log on again! And your log-on time also automatically expires after awhile. It’s retarded.
There are way too many instances of “Read more…” on the site. You click on an artist’s name. You go to the page. You get a little tiny paragraph with some photos under it and “Read more…”. You click on an artist’s album. A few lines and then “Read more…”.
Links within an artist bio, album review, etc., do not (usually) lead directly to those pages. Rather, they are automatically plugged into the site’s search engine, and you get a table of results. A unique but stupid method. The exception is when the search term would have taken you directly to a page (this only happens with fairly distinct names).
The overall look of the site is also pretty much shithouse. Too busy, too self-important, too not really functional. It looks like a site created as a big deal back in 2000 or so (whether it was or not, I know not).
Too bad. Good content, crap design. They need to overhaul that thing.