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City of Sound is about cities, design, architecture, music, media, politics and more. Written by Dan Hill since 2001.

Allmusic not all browsers

Written in

July 14, 2004

Dan Hill

Slightly less irritating than the Odeon cinema chain’s recent manouevres (rightly picked up by Messrs Jones and Gyford) but only slightly – allmusic.com has just got that little bit less accessible. Yesterday, their redesigned front pages were proclaiming that the new site only worked properly in Internet Explorer on Windows.

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. Despite some users flattering comparison of our site with that of Google, Amazon and Yahoo!, we are a small company with limited resources. So, we had to pick the most widely used browser by our users (over 87%) to optimize the site for and then work on compatibility issues with the other major browsers as we go forward."

Poppycock. Depends what you mean by "optimizing a site" I suppose. I’m not too impressed with Allmusic.com’s new redesign at the mo. Not least a silly words-on-sticks interface which is essentially a series of hidden but perfectly straightforward links. The album layout now forces expanded reviews and tracklistings on to separate pages, too. It seems to me, at first glance, that one of the most useful music sites online has just got a bit worse.

To be fair, they do say "we are concentrating on making the site more accessible through Opera, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari. We know how important it is to our users and we’re moving quick". Credit to them for responding to users quickly … but I can’t see why their site wouldn’t have been standards-compliant in the first place. Would’ve been quicker and cheaper.

Allmusic.com: Updates & responses to your feedback
Allmusic.com

3 responses to “Allmusic not all browsers”

Rob Annable

July 14, 2004

It’s no better over at bignoisemusic – I blogged about it a few weeks back:
http://rob.annable.co.uk/journal.cgi/2004/05/26/music/bignoisemusic
Since these guys share their cut with Oxfam, it somehow seems even more offensive.

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Naz

July 17, 2004

You may be interested in this as well:
http://giganticmag.com/index.php?p=118
Allmusic even responded on his site.

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Dan

April 25, 2006

Two years later, I get an email to the ‘All Music Insiders’ alerts list:

“Happy Spring! If you have visited allmusic.com in the past week, you will know that the spring season can be full of surprises. Yes, we are referring to the design changes made recently to allmusic.com. We have already received some positive and constructive feedback from many of you, and we wanted to let you know more about the changes that we have made in hopes to improve usability of the site. Not just the design of allmusic has been changed — we have also expanded some editorial features such as “The Whole Note” and “Classical Corner”.”

“We have made the new look more easily accessible when using the latest versions of IE, FireFox, Opera, and Safari. You will also notice the more easy-to-read font size and colors. We have also fixed many ‘bugs’ with this most recent site launch and work hard to resolve more issues. We are continuing to evaluate new features and functionality for the site.”

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