Some of the Music is Good. The Site… Not so Much.

I love music. I love good music, bad music, even some things that can only be loosely called music. I think I love music because I appre­ci­ate any art form that requires tal­ent. I also know that at no time in the near future will I be per­form­ing any sort of music in front of any­one who isn’t in my shower.

Why do I chose not to per­form music? Because I suck at it, that’s why. Know­ing that I suck at it is the first step to quelling the desire to sub­ject oth­ers to my suck. If only more peo­ple would take this to heart, we’d have fewer bad karaoke singers plagu­ing the bar while I’m try­ing to play pool. This phi­los­o­phy should be car­ried over to other art forms as well. Such as, say… Web design?

Is that Comic Sans, seriously?

The site is for the Play­ground Record­ing Stu­dio, and while I’m cer­tain that they do great things with music, they do poor things with web­sites. These guys made a doosy of a site. It starts out with a song (that inci­den­tally took for­ever to start play­ing, more on that later), and every­thing goes down hill from there.

I decided to scroll down the page a bit, which was no small feat. There was a Flash MP3 player, so I fig­ured I’d lis­ten to a song while I scrolled. My song started play­ing, and all was well. Then it started to sound like the artist went insane and changed tempo. Not only tempo, but style and voice as well. And where the hell did these backup singers come from?

As it turned out, the orig­i­nal song (the embed­ded one) finally loaded and tram­pled the song I vol­un­teered to hear. Whether or not I liked the song I clicked, is it right to auto-load one over it? I think not. I had to scroll all the way back to the top of the page to shut that one up. At least I could shut it up.

The site’s puke green header (the design has changed) and sim­i­lar side­bar don’t do much for me, but what really gets me is the graph paper back­ground. It reminds me of geom­e­try class. The whole thing con­ve­niently makes use of every font and color under the sun, and makes things look like links that aren’t links. Funny, some things that should be linked aren’t. Another inter­est­ing touch is going from one col­umn to two, then back to one only to fin­ish on three. Did you fol­low that? I didn’t.

Half the text is in ital­ics, and half of that is either giant ital­ics or micro­scopic ital­ics. The stuff that isn’t ital­i­cized must not be too impor­tant, since the rest is, well… ital­i­cized. I’m also a big fan of slow load­ing Flash image gal­leries which, when on screen, pre­vent you from scrolling.

It takes count­less hours of prac­tice to be come good at any­thing. That’s the rea­son that human beings pay other human beings to do the things they haven’t spent count­less hours get­ting good at. We can’t all be good at every­thing. Using this logic, why on earth does every­one seem to think it’s OK to take a crack at doing their own website?

The com­mon theme here is, pay some­one who has a clue…

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