Pitchfork is a US-based music news and reviews website. Like NME, but with more intelligence and not targeted to people under 12. Their site used to be a rather monotone blue/grey colour, but the navigation was clear enough.

2005 saw the launch of their redesigned website. Same content, but presented in a new format.

The adverts are the same – the usual promos for new artists or releases, plus the ubiquitous SuicideGirls banner ads. The format of the content is ghastly.

First up, are the section headings, which are now almost as small (and sometimes smaller) than the text that they accompany. The headings don’t stand out on the blue background which makes locating stuff difficult.

What about the content? Apart from some (?) of the dates, which are in red, the rest of the content is in various tasteful shades of grey. Links, body text, heading text, lists, everything is in grey. When is a link not a link? You can’t tell. Some text changes colour (naturally to another shade of grey) when rolled-over, other text doesn’t (even though it is a link).

Now the layout. I have a pretty large main display, but my browser window gives me about 820 pixels deep for a page to display in. I visit Pitchfork daily. It is after all a news website. So what does one see when visiting the site. A Daily Feature, Record Review and Weekly Feature. Lower down Track Reviews and a teasing header for News. So to read the news I need to scroll down! The site should be arranged so that News is the first thing people see. Maybe alongside this the Daily Feature and Record Reviews. Then underneath the Daily Feature, you could have the Weekly Feature.

But this leads to another problem: what is the difference between a Record Review and a Track Review? Clearly Track Review is just one track, and record review is a whole record. I feel that they would be better together, even if they are subdivided to show the distinction.

Due to time constraints I can’t do a mock up of my preferred version, but it would look something like: