Dwarf on the Intarweb - Howard Goodall

Ha HA! I’ll bet you all — okay, you both — thought I was dead or something, didn’t you?

Well, I wasn’t. I did, however, discover classic Doctor Who, and, well, Tom Baker, and his hair, and his lovely voice…well, I got sort of…distracted, see. I mean, Tom Baker. Come on. You can’t fault me. It’s Tom Baker.

At any rate, here I am, and the reason here is where I have positioned myself is that I want to tell you about Howard Goodall’s web presence. Remember the last one of these things I did? Yeah, I said then that next time I’d cover this website (it’s in with my other Linkys! if you want to look).

Immediately, of course, I run into a problem. See, there’s just not much to say about the website of one of the best composers Britain has to offer. The man himself has a wealth of distinctions and honors under his belt, and rightly so, but his website is kind of…meh. The first page you see, a sort of splash/navigation page, has as its background a photo from (I assume from looking at other parts of his site) the television series How Music Works, and I think that’s about as spiffy as the graphics get around there.

The other pages, with few exceptions, have a pale grey background — nothing too hard on the eyes, which is nice, but nothing particularly daring or difficult for a website designer to acomplish, I’ll bet. The choice of fonts is a bit basic, too: the ubiquitous Comic Sans MS for the index page, and I’m guessing Tahoma for most of the text, or maybe Arial. (A quick MS Word check tells me that I was dead wrong. It’s Trebuchet MS, another fairly well-used font.) All this certainly serves its purpose well, but the overwhelming impression is of a very, very bare-bones website indeed. In fact, if it weren’t so scrupulously updated, I’d say that the site was several years old. (Those “return to index” buttons certainly look jarringly ancient by contemprary standards. I bet my mother could whip up something far nicer in Paintshop in minutes. Seriously.) And lastly, I think perhaps whoever updates the website would do well to cut down on the number of pictures (s)he puts on a given page. Maybe it’s just my craptastic dial-up connection, but I swear the “latest news” page must’ve taken ten minutes to load. That ain’t right.

If it sounds like I’m just a nasty old bitch who can’t be pleased with anything, I don’t mean to. After all, the site is as compendious and up-to-date as one could wish (whoever maintains Chris Barrie’s site, take note). It’s nice to see a website that appears to take the fan into consideration as more than an afterthought after throwing up a CV for the people who might hire him. Given the choice, I would much rather see a site that’s too basic than one that’s too ornate or Flash-y (I’ll get to one of them in a future article), but in 2007 it’s perfectly possible to have a nice basic site, free of Flash and loading problems, which design doesn’t send the visitor to sleep.

Arlene’s Verdict: If Mr. Goodall is paying someone to maintain this site, I hope he’s not paying much. Altho’ if he’s doing all this by himself, I applaud his hard work — right before I suggest he start paying someone to keep up his website.

And for my next Very Special Installment of “Dwarf on the Intarweb”, I take on Robert Llewellyn’s website. Pray for me.