Musica Web site dull and discordant

Musica describes itself as SA`s largest retailer of CDs, tapes and allied products, and is a trading brand of The Clicks Organisation.

The company`s foray into electronic sales and delivery has for the most part been limited to its agreement with gift voucher store, Streetcar.com. Now, the retailer has its own Web site, which was launched late last year.

The site is visually boring and horribly uninviting. All page views are segmented, broken up into blocks featuring bits and pieces of information that change as the user moves around the site.

There are two sets of navigation bars at the top left, a dropdown menu from which you can browse music by type at top right, and more dropdown menus that allow users to search by artist, title or song, in various genres, somewhere closer to the bottom of the page.

The various search boxes and dropdown menus are separated by a middle section which is broken up into boxes. On the home page, these boxes display current specials, a CD artwork image, and a brief description of the selected item or special offer.

The bottom of the page features two strangely misplaced buttons which allow you to view the contents of your shopping basket and to check out. There`s also a very tiny link to the Musica Affiliates Program page - which is evidently incomplete or just not running. Maybe that`s why the link looks like a (tiny) pink elephant hiding behind an office fern, trying very hard not to be noticed.

The site has a number of useful ideas - it will supposedly allow customers to view a broad range of available titles, and if the database were up to scratch, drill deeper to find track listings, song samples, biographies, reviews, and the record label that CD is on. Why that would be of interest to anyone but a serious musicologist, one shudders to ask, but hey, it`s there. Read it.

There are newsletters to which one can subscribe, and a pop-up e-zine edited by that stalwart of the music media industry, Malu van Leeuwen.

Navigation is accomplished through the set of double navigation bars. The upper set takes you to different feature sections within the site; the transition is made very clear by a change in background colour.

The lower set allows you to move around within the sub-section, but stay sharp-eyed, or it`ll take some time to notice the changes in text as you move around. It`s all very uniform and almost chameleon-like in nature.

The site claims to have 10 times as many CDs as its branches nationwide - yet it lists a grand total of seven artists when one logs in to My Musica. These appear to be the best sellers of the moment.

The browse by category dropdown remains in place - but it remains limited in functionality. An attempt to browse selections in the Rock & Pop genre narrowed those seven artists down to Beatles, John, Elton and Martin, Ricky. Other genres bring up more information, but it is sometimes questionable. It lists, among others, Aerosmith under SA Rock & Pop, and a compilation of concertos conducted by John Williams, under Reggae.

There are also several handy guides such as chart listings, new releases and the 50 top selling CDs.

The main issue I have with the registration process is that there are no options to choose a number of musical preferences. There is room for one default selection. When you log in to My Musica, there is no perceived personalisation of any kind.

There are four options - login, register, deregister and a password reminder. I registered last week, and when I tried to login today, I pressed the wrong button and despite the fact that my username and password details already exist on the database, I was taken through to the registration form.

I filled it in out of curiosity, using the same personal details and slightly different delivery details, and lo and behold, I was welcomed as a new user. Later, I found that the new registration details had been added to my original information.

Buying what you`ve selected is a tedious process - once you try to check out, you`re taken through a three-page confirmation of your address details, your invoice details and eventually, when you confirm that everything is as you want it, the purchase window is a Thawte-secured interstitial.

Delivery is promised within three to five days, and the fee is R25. When you consider that most of the titles are priced the same as those available from stores, it would make more sense to take a walk down to the nearest branch, and save yourself the money and time it would take to buy online.