Garageband.com

I recently signed up for garageband.com. It looked like an interesting place that offered a service that I wanted to partake of, namely making people listen to Tonto Savalas and the Buddha All-Stars music and having them write reviews of it. In exchange, I will listen to their music and write reviews. Fair exchange. So, I sat down and listened to songs, wrote a bunch of reviews. I had some fun with it, too. Discovered I can be a bit of a bastard when it comes to giving my opinions. But at some point, I decided to have a look around the site and see what it could actually do for me. Which is when I posted in their forum and emailed them with this:

This sevice is a great idea. A lot of people are looking for reviews and the way things are set up forces you to write reviews. Truth to tell, I actually enjoy writing a good portion of the reviews.
But, honestly, your interface sucks. I want that to come across firmly. It sucks. I look at a lot of web pages, so I know my way around one.

On the good pages, when i look for a link or a button to activate one of the site's functions, I can find it. It's clearly marked and visible. Garageband.com is extremely far away from being a good one. It sucks.

On a good website, the content is clearly defined. I can make use of the content without being overtly distracted. I'm not on edge all of the time, worried about whether the slightest little mouse click will blast me into advertising hell.

And I want a forum. I went to that tiny thing you have masquerading as a forum. I'm posting this on their right now, where it will die a slow, lonely death. People can't use that. You don't have to maintain the uber-advertising design in every part of the site. Let the forum be the forum. If people are using the forum, then odds are they are using the main page. They'll come back to it.

The amount of songs you have to review to insane. And that's just to get one song up. Your first song. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of people are discouraged before they even get the chance to be heard. Of course, you could also pay and I suppose that's really the point. Except for you're offering a lousy product as far as actual content and design are concerned and you're doing it for truly exorbinant prices. Hosting one song for and entry into the 'contest' for 19.99? That's insane.

And as far as the contest goes... maybe it has real-life rewards in marketing a band and maybe that's a lot of smoke and mirrors. Like a lottery ticket. I'm here mainly for the reviews and the hosting's nice too, but there are lots of places that offer that for free or infinitely cheaper.

Maybe all this is just corporate sensebilities in effect and I'm shouting at a brick wall.

And since I went through all the bother of actually writing that, I'm damn well going to post it on my own site. I'm off to write more reviews. I hope I don't make anyone cry.