While I’m picking on things that don’t matter much but are still annoying, I’d like to direct your attention to Shutterbug.com, the web version of Shutterbug magazine. Specifically, take a look at how their lens review page is organized. A bit of a mess, right?
The article titles are oddly uninformative for their length, the three options of sorting are really only two, and there’s no bit of sample text available, not even as a rollover. There’s no planned hierarchy about the way the articles stored and displayed. It feels to me like older, more cluttered web and hand rolled web design, like something that’s never seen how blogs operate or gleaned relevant bits of current layout practices and the theories behind them.
But more grating to me is the lack of tags. This next bit probably requires a small bit of SLR knowledge, so here: each body manufacturer has a different lens mounting system. This means Canon bodies don’t accept Nikon, Pentax, Sony, etc. mounts, so picking your first body and starting to spend any decent money on lenses means that, barring becoming a Very Wealthy Person or inheriting someone else’s stuff, you’re probably going to be using one lens system*. So it seems to me that it’d be very useful for Shutterbug to tag entries, and have an easy way to sort the tags, for the different mounting systems. Having dropped a decent sum on a Canon lens, I’m going to be sticking with their bodies and lenses*, rendering any reviews of Nikon lenses almost entirely useless to me, except as a bit of masochistic method of inducing buyer’s remorse.
It’s nearly 2009, is forcing the use of a search bar the best you can do? If you started nodding your head, you need a new web designer.
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* Third-Party lens manufacturers (Tamron, Lensbaby, etc) make lenses with different mounts, so you’re not entirely locked into one manufacturers lenses, but the overall effect is close enough for horseshoes.
