steve kwan user experience designer

Why do musicians always have crummy websites?

(April 10th, 2006 - 3:33PM)

Not that it's really surprising that musicians tend to have lousy, overly flashy websites. Musicians often go out of their way to look unconventional and interesting, so it's not surprising that they'd break the Web conventions commonly used by professional websites. All the same, those conventions were established for a reason: usability.

I've touched on this earlier in previous posts about Kate Bush and Matthew Good. I've found another example: the Panic! At The Disco website.

Panic! At The Disco is a great band, but their website gives a different impression entirely. Here are my gripes.

• It's one big Flash animation. While this isn't an uncommon setup, it renders the Back button and bookmarking useless.
• The Flash animation takes too long to load, especially considering how unimpressive the site looks.
• The 3D furniture reminds me of my drafting projects in grade 12, which weren't that impressive.
• The "navigate by command prompt" interface is a pain in the ass. Try navigating the site. Instead of just clicking a link to find what you want, you have to type a term into a command prompt like a DOS console. This is a pain in the ass if you don't know which pages are available on the site, which I assume is almost always the case. I thought we were all in agreement that getting rid of command prompts was one of the best usability improvements in the last twenty years.
• The whole "apartment" metaphor doesn't work at all. Instead of searching by something useful ("bio," "discography," "forums," "tour dates"), you have to search by furniture or room. For example, if you want to see the band's tour dates, you have to type "globe" into the search box. The Flash animation will then "walk you into the office" where you can click on a globe to view the band's tour dates. Wouldn't it be much easier to just click a link that says "tour dates?"

I'm tired of ranting about this website. After all, it's not that uncommon for musicians to have crappy websites. But sites like Panic!'s just make me appreciate the bands with good sites a little more. Damsel Fly (there we go again with the name dropping) has an excellent, easy to navigate website, and it still looks good. Why can't more bands be like them?

Go to the Panic! At The Disco website.

View a screenshot of the Panic! At The Disco website.