Website Of The Week – Ticketmaster
Selling entertainment over the web is currently the place to be. Anything relatively cheap, which can be easily searched for by users and posted out to their homes is perfect for a transactional site on the internet. Indeed, a recent survey claimed that the number of transactional websites would grow by over 900% in the next four years. Amazon.com, the company which is tugging faintly but persistently at the foundations of the US book-selling industry, has just recently launched a UK version. As well as books, there are tickets, CDs and software. All of these things can be sold effectively and quickly via the internet.
In the light of this, a company like Ticketmaster should stand to do well on the Net. The transactional sites which can get a foothold in the marketplace now, and establish themselves as the first port of call for their particular products, could well become the leaders in that field over the next few years. Ticketmaster could well be one of those leaders, but it will need to polish up its website first.
Whilst Ticketmaster is very functional, and holds information about a lot of tickets, it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of appearance and design. For some reason, the best-designed page on the whole of the site is one that only really appears once. After you leave this first page, there are no links back there, so it seems a bit of a waste really. Also on the minus side is that a number of areas are still under construction or contain empty pages, and there are a few rogue graphics and borders flying about.
All of this is aesthetic, however, and the purpose of the site – to provide access to a broad range of tickets and allow the user to purchase them online – works very well. Events covered by Ticketmaster range from Opera and Ballet right through Grimethorpe Colliery Band to out and out rock ‘n’ roll. This includes comedy (although the Cosmic Comedy Club in Hammersmith isn’t listed) and that perpetual big-seller, sport.
The site usefully allows you to search by either artist/event, venue, date or town. This means it’s very easy to pinpoint the event you’re after. There is also a freetext search that checks the whole site for your search term. I got the feeling though, that the venue information is fairly ‘Londo-centric’; there are many more gigs in and around Sheffield than the University, for example.
Despite its broad range of events, the slant of Ticketmaster is away from gigs and small events and towards the big names and shows. The list of the 50 most popular Ticketmaster events confirms this: Michael Flatley, Phantom of the Opera and Chicago are all up there. Nevertheless, the service it provides is quick and easy and much preferable to trawling through reams of listings guides.
Information about each venue tells you how to get there, the type of place, whether there’s anywhere to park and other invaluable trip-planning things. A street map, which, on a number of other sites is provided by MultiMedia Mapping, would improve this further.
The only other qualm is that tickets can’t be ordered by Switch; so if, like me, you don’t have a Visa, Mastercard or American Express (which is probably no-one, admittedly), Ticketmaster isn’t very useful. Otherwise, along with Aloud.com for music, this is a very good site for ents and shows tickets, but a little design attention wouldn’t go amiss.