The voices are telling me that Art Grauer said on 7/14/2004 9:09 AM:
AMG has posted a response to the criticism of the new design here (amusing):
http://www.gloriousnoise.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=1992
[snip]
[From the reply]:
SUPPORT OF NON-IE FOR WINDOWS BROWSERS Optimizing a site of allmusic's complexity and size for all browsers
and operating systems is no small feat. This isn't a simple
"brochure-ware" site of static pages. While we would love to optimize
the AMG sites for all browsers and all operating systems, we simply
don't have the necessary resources to do so.
[snip]
I think it may be a case of a design team being in way over their heads...
Now we can get specific. They've made some fundamental mistakes about the purpose of their site. The question is (as always), who are the players, and what do they consider to be value?
I suggest that there are two major players:
(1) Site visitors and (2) The site owner
Now we can ask what represents value to each of them.
(1) Site visitors Information. Mostly text, mostly lists: Albums by the artist (title, date, label) Songs on the album (title, composer, time) Personnel on the album (name, instrument) Review of the artist Review of the album
(2) The site owner Links to their chosen "buy it now" site Ads
Sound clips, album cover pictures, and artist pictures represent additional value to site visitors, but almost no one goes to allmusic.com to get those things. They're of secondary importance to the site visitors, and probably of negative value (considering the bandwidth they consume) to the site owner.
Eye candy and the stylish stuff is tertiary.
Now that we know what the site owner and the customer consider to be value, we know the first question we can ask: "What's the best way to deliver text, ads, and 'buy it now' links?"
Nobody has to tell members of *this* list that anything that isn't signal is noise. Anything that isn't directly delivering what the players consider to be value is taking value away from the players.
And yet you and I know they spent a huge fraction of their budget on the bling-bling. They spent it on things that don't add any appreciable value. And for certain classes of visitors -- owners of premium browsers, people with different abilities, people with different web surfing devices, people who are smart enough to turn off ActiveX and active scripting on MSIE -- they spent money to take away value.
Let's hit that quote again:
> This isn't a simple "brochure-ware" site of static pages.
Why not?
And this:
> Optimizing a site of allmusic's complexity and size for all browsers > and operating systems is no small feat.
What is the business value of complexity? -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/
Don't ask yourself what the world needs - ask yourself what makes you
come alive, and then go do it. Because what the world needs is people
who have come alive. -- Howard Thurman
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