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.

Continue reading First Impressions of the New Guitar.com

I have just added a couple sites to my blogroll so I thought I’d point them out.

MusicGadgets.net

I have come across the site more than once in my online travels and have decided to make it part of my daily reads. The site posts interesting news and information about great music gadgets. It is an open topic music gear site, but there are a lot of guitars and guitar related posts to read.

Check out the main page at MusicGadgets.net or here are a couple of noteworthy posts that I found interesting:
Midomi, recognize the song with your singing
Tronical PowerTune System
DIY again: credit card picks
Monster Guitar Picks

Indieguitarist

Here is another guy, who like me loves guitars and music. I dont know what more I can say about it. I have had a lot of fun reading his posts so I added him as well. Check out this post about his guitars. He has some nice ones, and his collection has actually grown. He sent me a picture of his Wall o’ Guitars and I am seriously jealous.

If you try and visit guitar.com right now you will see that the site is completely down while they do a redesign. I haven’t been to the site in quite a while and thought I’d visit it the other day when to my surprise I was greeted with the following message:

The new guitar.com is in production. We hope you’ll come back to see what we’ve done, it’s pretty exciting. The new guitar.com will be a place for guitarists to interact musically and socially. We’ve developed Rype, a desktop application that allows musicians to record, edit and produce music. Rype has a social network built around it to allow musicians to collaborate, send each other music files, projects for collaboration, video chat, voice chat and instant message via Skype. Form virtual bands on guitar.com, then launch Rype, produce your songs and post them for sale on iTunes.

So it looks like guitar.com is jumping on the web 2.0 bandwagon and implementing some more social networking aspects. I am excited to see that the new site will be. As of now the forums are still up, so you can swing by there and take a look.

Also in production is a new Guitar One Magazine website, but they are not planning on being up until late March. That is a long time to have your website down if you ask me. I would think you would want to just keep the old one up while you were working on the new one.