I have been using the new Guitar.com for a day or so now and I feel I have experienced it enough to give you my initial impressions.

It really really wants to be a Web 2.0 site, but sadly, it’s not. The site has a very Cliché CSS look, but the feel is lacking. The problem is the website is full of content that looks like you can edit it inline, but in actual fact you can’t. When you hit update it submits the information old-web style and refreshes the page. Because of this, I really don’t like the way the profile editing is setup. If you click edit beside more than on field, and then click update, it will only update the last one you edited – this is annoying and time consuming if you want to update more than one thing at once.

Don’t get me wrong, I do like how you can create a complete profile full of all your favorite artists, music, videos, and gear. I think this is the essence of what the site is supposed to be about. Guitar players love to talk about gear and music. The fact that you can earn money from suggesting gear to others is interesting too. The problem is the whole site feels like it is focused on selling first and being a community second. An example of this is when you are adding all your gear to your profile, it clearly just searches Musician’s Friend. So if you have gear that is not currently available for purchase, you can’t add it to your profile. Despite the fact that my 81/85 EMG Pickups and Line 6 Spider II amp are very popular, they are not available on musiciansfriend.com, so I couldn’t recommend them. This is problem with the music recommendation section as well. If you do a search for an album that is not currently available on iTunes or Amazon.com you wont be able to add it to your profile.

The Your $0.02 feature is sort of interesting, but also sort of gimmicky. It’s like a voting system, but you can vote for anything you like and it shows the results in a cloud style view. The current vote is Greatest Guitarist of all time.

I think the saving grace might be the Get Educated section. Here is where all the user generated lessons are. There are lots of sites out there that let users submit lessons and tips, but I think this is the first site I have seen that is focusing on video content. If Guitar.com has anything going for it, this is it. I think the layout really needs to be tweaked, but overall, this is a good feature.

My final thought after a day of use is I’m not a huge fan of the site. It seems to me that it will be more of a gathering place for entrepreneurs rather than musicians. Maybe that is what they wanted though – then they will leave it up to the search engines to bring them potential customers. If they were asking my opinion would be they need to fix some things in the user interface to make the experience more enjoyable and they need to focus on building a community first and then making money second. The site is still in beta so I’ll be watching how things pan out in the final version. I realize this is not the way it will look in the end, but I hope they make some major changes.

Related posts:

1. Guitar.com Goes Web 2.0, Public Beta Now Open
2. Sites added to my Blogroll
3. Allmusic.com – Where to Find New Music
4. Last.fm – Where to Find New Music Part 3
5. New Guitar.com in Production