29 February 2008

SF Symphony- my modest request #2

While we're on the topic of unsolicited suggestions to make your website better, request number two is this: can you please make your search function useful? Right now, it is utterly beyond useless. For example, I want to find out if you've ever performed Janacek's Glagolitic Mass. I type in Glagolitic Mass in your search box, but yield nothing, because it wasn't in this season. It turns out you did perform this great piece-- on 8 Jan. 2005. But I couldn't find this info anywhere on your website.

Instead, where did I find this information? I had to go to San Francisco Classical Voice and do a search there, which yielded this review by Lisa Hirsch. In fact, every time I want to look up your past performance repertoire info, I go to SFCV. You might find nothing wrong with the fact that I have to go to an external website to do a search on your past repertoire, but I really should be able to do this search on your website.

Or if you are going to outsource this and let SFCV be your de facto external search engine, perhaps you should pay them commission for this service. I'm sure can use the extra funds. They'd get quite a hefty sum of cash, just from my use of their search engine to search for your past concert program info.

Perhaps this info is all there and staring at me from an obvious location and I'm just being a big moron. But I just clicked though all of your tabs and couldn't find this info anywhere. (As of 29 Feb 2008, that is. I hope this info will be obsolete some day, though.)

So instead of a not-so-helpful fancy concierge service replete with fancy flash, how about a low-tech searchable archive of your past repertoire
somewhere first?

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