The A.V. Club

www.avclub.com

Intended Audience:

-Consumers of pop culture in all its forms: movies, TV, music, video games, and literature. The site includes reviews of current releases in all these areas, interesting and well-informed interviews with artists, quirky features, and hilarious blogs. The site also contains archives of reviews, features, and interviews, going back about 10 years.

-Readers of the AV Club's sister (parent?) site, The Onion.

-Snarky hipsters and snarkier anti-hipsters.

Usefulness of Content:

How useful the content might be to someone varies depending on audience and use. I've consulted the movie reviews to decide which film I'd rather pay $10 to see (pretty useful), but I've also spent countless hours that would probably have been better spent working poking around the various archives (not useful at all; in fact, counter-productive). If you're looking to get informed, professionally written, and very well contextualized music and movie reviews, this is a great site. If you're looking to spend some time zoning out and laughing uproariously at "The Hater," "Savage Love," or "Commentary Tracks of the Damned," it's also pretty great for that. In a larger sense, though, the content is probably not very useful for a wide audience.

Consistency of Design:

The site received a major design overhaul sometime in the last two years, and I notice that there are frequent tweaks to layout and design every couple of months or so. The site is mostly done on a cream background with green lettering for content and title headings, with some black and orange accents here and there, a combo I really like. These colors and AV Club logo are consistent throughout all the pages. The articles are usually highlighted by interesting photographs of musical acts or actors (not your typical magazine fare) that add to the experience. My only gripe (constant, both with this site and with The Onion), are the number of rolling/scrolling/moving/incredibly disruptive advertisements around the whole site. Sometimes you have to click through an ad before getting to the actual page (this may be a navigation thing), and the advertisers on this site seem to love those ads that pop out in the middle of the page, obscuring what you're reading, and making the "close" button as elusive as it could possible be. It may not be the AV Club's fault since it relies on the ad revenue, but it's damned annoying and totally disruptive to my enjoyment of the site.

Ease of Navigation:

This site is pretty easy to navigate around, though the various placement of menus and links to other features can be a little overwhelming. From the main page there are links across the top leading to the major categories (DVD, Music, Words, etc), links on the left to blogs, main features in the middle, and links to current reviews with letter grades on the right. Below this, there's a list of recent features, and to the right of this, links once again to the various divisions of entertainment. It's a lot to take in. Additionally, from each article, there are links on the right to: articles by the same author, articles within the same category, or simply recent articles spanning many categories. I guess it depends on what kind of article it is for which types of links show up on the right, but I have not figured it out yet. In any case, the links on the left stay constant throughout the articles you visit, so you can always navigate back to a category or the main page easily. The archive feature works pretty well - I especially like that within "Features" and "Interviews," you can search for subcategories of Cinema/Music/TV/Literature/Games features and interviews. Overall, while the navigation may appear convoluted at first, once you've visited the site a few (hundred) times, it's very efficient to navigate from the menu bar on the left between articles and categories.