SamadhiSound Website Review

The more I think about it, the more I think that the SamadhiSound website is everything I wish the recently-redesigned 4AD website had been. Whereas 4AD forces you to use that silly, gimmicky wheel thingie to navigate their catalog (or, conversely, the text links clear on the other side of the site) and clutters up their pages with poorly-designed graphics and squished-together content, SamadhiSound keeps things nice, simple, atmospheric, and graceful.

The basic layout of SamadhiSound’s website certainly isn’t mind-blowing (it’s a basic 2-column CSS layout), but their simplicity actually encourages exploration, and maintains a fairly consistent look and feel across the site. On the other hand, 4AD’s wheel is bound to frustrate folks more often than not. (Any web interface that requires a user’s manual is inherently flawed.)

I would be greatly remiss if I didn’t mention the gorgeous artwork adorning SamadhiSound’s pages, artwork such as this and this. The artwork, which is often taken from SamadhiSound releases, not only adds a nice atmosphere to the site that draws you in, but it also reinforces SamadhiSound’s “image” and meshes nicely with its music. Furthermore, they spotlight the work of the many visual artists that contribute to SamadhiSound.

One would think that 4AD would have capitalized on their long association with 23 Envelope/v23 and done something similar.

The site isn’t perfect. The Flash interfaces could be easily replaced with CSS-styled lists, and sometimes the placement of the menu causes the navigation to get lost in the background artwork. There are also some discrepancies that could easily be fixed, such as showing article dates in the news archives. And after taking a peek at the source, the markup could be a bit more semantic (methinks there are a few too many <h1> tags on any given page).

However, most of these are very minor flaws that are easily fixable, and don’t really detract from the overall site.