Comments on: New Roland Connect Site Features New Gear, Mind-Numbingly Bad Web Design

By: Torley

Torley — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 01:21:58 +0000

We should have a roundup of all the music manufacturer webdesign revamps that've been coming in lately.

By: derrick s

derrick s — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 08:04:25 +0000

more worse than the design is the lineup

how about some innovation or combining some of their loved analog stuff with new ?

By: synthhead

synthhead — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:05:40 +0000

Ugly but functional is my motto.

If you have suggestions for the site, though, let me know!

By: dubsonic

dubsonic — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 17:21:58 +0000

If you take a quick look under the hood, the whole site is SEO'ed to the max. Better than moving Flash menus or lame eyecandy. Kudos to the coder, not so much to the designer. BTW, Synthtopia is not exactly the model of good web design.

By: aL:

aL: — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 14:27:03 +0000

What got me was that the new products weren't arranged in any apparent order. Two new drum sets, but they aren't together… two new effects pedals, but they aren't together… the items don't seem to be in any order at all, just randomly thrown together as "new gear". The Flash video is a complete waste of my time and connection bandwidth, there's absolutely no meaningful content in it but it takes up the majority of screen space.

I won't go so far as to say "bad web design", but certainly poor and uninspired web design, and web design that makes the product for sale — the actual point of the web site — secondary to glitz of the site.

By: Gordon

Gordon — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 06:09:18 +0000

To be fair on them though, the pictures are the real explanation. In fact, they should ditch the text altogether. Better still, wee roll-over samples of the instrument in action would be cool.
Anyway, generic terms can be confusing for some of the new gear. I've got into a lather trying to navigate to some stuff recently e.g. does this portable loop / groovebox thingy classify as a 'drum computer' a 'keyboards>synths>modules>rhythm module'; 'studio gear' or 'outboard fx'??

By: Gordon

Gordon — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 06:06:23 +0000

To be fair on them though, the pictures are the real explanation. In fact, they should ditch the text altogether. Better still, wee roll-over samples of the instrument in action would be cool.
Anyway, generic terms can be confusing for some of the new gear. I've got into a lather trying to navigate to some stuff recently e.g. does this thing classify as a 'drum computer' a 'keyboards>synths>modules>rhythm module' or 'studio gear'??

By: Gordon

Gordon — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 06:03:47 +0000

To be fair on them though, the pictures are the real explanation. In fact, they should ditch the text altogether. Better still, wee roll-over samples of the instrument in action would be cool.