www.allmusic.com: content great, shit for design

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.

The scary part is that this site actually used to be functionally designed and worked reasonably well. The site you’re looking at is the overhaul. I can’t remember exactly when it happened, but if you do a search here, there were some complaints about the completely illogical choice of design. And while that fancy little animated thing at the top of the screen looks pretty, ever tried to load that on dial-up? Yikes.

That’s like some of the shopping sites I’ve seen. Navigate to Apparel, then to Men’s, then to Underwear, then to Naughty, the to Crotchless. This is usually a painful process that takes upwards of 30 minutes. Find a style and size you like, then click on Add To Cart. You then kicked back to the home page, and if you want to buy another pair, you have to navigate through the site all over again.

These sites should contain a button called “Fuck this. It just ain’t worth it.”

Grammar an spelling my frend.

They have no mention of any of the bands I’ve been in, so fuck 'em! :stuck_out_tongue:

I agree. The old site was much easier to navigate. If I brought up an artist with the old site it seemed like I had just about everything I wanted to know on the first page. If I wanted more discography or more bio, I could get it. I liked the “more” feature on the old site because it allowed more info to be put on the first page. I don’t find the first “Overview” page of artists on the new site to be of much use at all.

Were you in these bands in the 80s? 'Cause if you were, they sucked. 'Cause every band in the 80s sucked.

Except for one. And I was in it. We rocked. :smiley:

I agree completely about the Allmusic site. I loved the old site, because it was a rare case of a site being designed strictly for usability. No fancy graphics, no java applets or shockwave. Just excellent navigation, page layout, searching, and viewing. Almost the perfect web site.

Then some freaking analyst decided the site wasn’t ‘cool’ enough, and they blow millions and create a monstrosity. I still use Allmusic regularly, because it’s got the best content around by far when it comes to music. But the site itself is painful. Their new web designers should be shot.

I thought somebody made a new front end or something to it when they went to the new unpopular design.

I agree that the functionality overall has gone to shit – I hate the “expand this item” on mouseover crap and I frequently find sample clips that don’t work, but I don’t ever have the log on problems you describe. Perhaps because I’m cookied there, I’m automatically logged in as soon as I open the site, and my log on has never expired on me during navigation that I recall.

Count me as another person that hates the new format. When they first switched to the new format it used to lock-up Opera (or I guess more accurately, Opera locked-up itself). I used to go to AMG just to browse and explore. Now I rarely go there and if I do, it is only to find a specific answer to a question.

I am not sure why they don’t link between articles and instead use the search function. I suspect that it simplifies the design since all of the articles are loosely coupled. I wonder if it also makes it harder to create bot to steal their content. For example, I have never seen a generic index by artist name. You always have to pump an entry through the search engine (or at least click one of their front-page links).

If you used less then 2 cans of hairspray a show, don’t even bother talking to me. :smiley:

Agreed. I’m just relieved they haven’t destroyed their sister site allmovie.com yet.

Example of erroneous info:

10cc

Snopes version

I even sent them the link, but never heard back.

For anybody interested, here’s a link to the original bitch thread: New, “improved” All-Music Guide. My original opinion still hasn’t changed: The design sucks but I keep going back. Nothing else can rival its content, despite the occasional mistake or omission.

Here’s what I was thinking of, it’s actually a firefox extension.
http://holovaty.com/blog/archive/2004/07/19/2210