Website Of The Week – Aloud.Com

http://www.aloud.com/

Aloud.com is your basic music ents guide on the internet with the added bonus that when you find a gig you’re interested in you can snap up the ticket there and then via the site’s booking system; and, as a further bonus, there is no surcharge on the tickets which booking agents usually charge.

Now all this would be fine and dandy if, and this is a big if, you could actually read the text which is on the screen. Quite a fundamental case of bad design really, is that the colours of the text and background for all the search results are such that the text takes on this nauseating shimmering; enough to incite at best a nasty headache and at worst total disorientation.

Aside from this problem the actual depth of service from the site is pretty good for anyone interested in getting hold of music tickets. The site mainly caters for Rock (in the very broad sense) although it does provide a link to the What’s On Stage site for theatre tickets.

Aloud.com is another example of a growing number of sites which integrate the services and applications of outside websites, to give a more comprehensive and full service. For example once you’ve found your band and venue you can get hold of a map of the area surrounding the venue via a link to the Multimedia Mapping site. This technique was also used by the a2b Travel site (subscribers see recent Website Of The Week – a2b Travel). The venue information also gives you the names and addresses of local watering holes and restaurants by linking to the Electronic Yellow Pages.

All this, plus being able to book your tickets and keep track of whether they have been dispatched with the Ticket Tracker, means that you can plan a pretty full night out. Unfortunately to discover all these things you’ll have to endure some serious eye-strain. Still, you’re going to knacker your ears at the gig most likely, so what the hell.

Reviewer: Scott Billings