allmusic.com
Sometime a few months ago, allmusic.com re-designed their site. Their previous design wasn’t bad, even though it relied on javascript for every single link, which was very annoying, requiring you to dig a bit and craft your own URLs on occasion.
Their new site design is the worst I’ve ever seen. This is the text of feedback I just sent them:
Hi.
I know you’ve already gotten a lot of feedback on it, but honestly, no amount is enough.
The new site design is horrible. Horrible. It’s the most horrible site re-design I’ve ever seen a major website undertake.
It’s quite literally unusable in Opera and practically unusable in countless others.
The flash applet at the top of every page is a massive resource-hog and is functionally useless.
Harsh words, I know, but I give them respectfully. I have loved your site for years, and the content alone is priceless.
Please, change it back, or fix it. I am begging. I will donate money. Anything. Please.
–Chris
hear hear! i couldn’t agree more. allmusic went from one of my favorite sites to one i sadly avoid. wtf were they thinking??
Yep, it’s awful. The “advanced search” setup is completely ridiculous. About the Opera issue, though, I wonder if it’s their fault or Opera’s. When they say it’s “optimized for IE”, does that just mean they didn’t test it in anything else, or did they use non-standard IE-specific features in their HTML/ECMAScript/CSS/whatever? I use Opera too, so I sympathize (though updating to the latest version helped a lot), but I wonder if we shouldn’t be sending mail to them too.
I think (I read this somewhere, but I can’t remember where) that it was a specific design decision (javascript?) to use something that wasn’t supported in Opera, or maybe I am confusing that with gmail, another non-opera-compatible site.
I don’t know. Really, I don’t care. I mean, come on, we’ve been doing this whole web design thing for over 15 years. Designing a compatible site is not that hard. For a site that big to be so utterly broken and incompatible is inexcusable.
I was going to say “even my little brother could design a better site than this”, until I realized that considering my little brother now practically does that for a living himself, that particular comparison has lost its oomph. Uhm: my grandmother could design a better site! yeah!
this is an interesting discussion on the whole thing, with allmusic’s response to criticism and observations about how users are working around the redesign:
http://www.waxy.org/archive/2004/07/13/all_musi.shtml