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Good Company, Bad Site
26 Sep 2003 by Brad Hurley
Compass Records is a rarity in the music industry: a record company with a good reputation among working musicians. That’s why it hurts to see them saddled with this newly redesigned site, which looks nice enough until you start trying to use it.
Browsing by genre takes you to a page like this. First, mouse over those colored buttons to the right of “genres.” See any alt text to indicate what genre is represented by each color? Nope. They’re useless as a navigation device. And there’s no alt text for the long row of album cover thumbnails down at the bottom either.
Okay, let’s check out an artist’s page. The brilliant British singer Kate Rusby’s page is lovely to look at, but again, there’s no alt text for the album covers so you just have to click randomly to find the CD you’re looking for. The lack of forethought in this approach becomes even more evident when you go to the page of an artist who has lots of recordings, such as Paul Brady. This site won’t stop me from buying records on the Compass label, but I guess in future I’ll buy them through Amazon.
8 comments so far (Post a Comment)
26 Sep 2003 | Don Schenck said...
Did you email your comments to them. Seriously, you should. We all have "blind spots" and need constructive criticism from time to time.
'cept me, of course. *cough*
27 Sep 2003 | pb said...
Why do web sites have to be so friggin fancy????
29 Sep 2003 | Greg said...
I did a redesign of the Compass frontpage and sent it to them about a year and a half ago. One of my favorite artists Bill Mallonee was on the label at the time as the Vigilantes of Love. His record had just been released, and the website sucked! I sent them a valid working page with major usability errors fixed and trimmed the page size down about 50%. Of course they said, thanks, but didn't do anything with it. You'd think they would test it out, implement it and send me a free cd. Talk about good publicity, I'd be telling lots of people. Instead they've still got their heads stuck in the sand.
29 Sep 2003 | Greg said...
That link for Bill Mallonee didn't seem to work.
It's http://www.billmallonee.com
22 Dec 2003 | active x controls said...
Yes, the link does not work
16 Jan 2004 | Magdalen said...
For example, if you see an AIM window peeking out from behind your browser and you click on it, that window will come to the front, but the main application window will not. The Mail.app/Activity Viewer is another example. The Aqua system of layers works well in many instances, but not in all. Thank goodness that the Dock is always there to come to the rescue. I know that clicking on an application icon in the Dock will always result in not only the application coming to the front, but also any non-minimized windows associated with it. And if the application is active but no windows are open, clicking on the Dock icon should create a new window in that application.
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