MTV.com Review

The first thing I noticed about MTV.com is that it opened with basically an ad, which is annoying, but not unexpected. The homepage is very modern, with polished, clean lines. It is pretty simply designed, with navigation across the top and then lots of “news” cells filling the rest of the page, all of which is really easy to use. Subpages have their own internal navigation layouts (some down the left, some across the top, tab-style, etc.) according to their purpose. The site is mostly black, white, and shades of gray, which I think is a good choice, because of the amounts of pictures, graphics, and streaming video. If they had chosen anything more colorful or complicated, the page would start to look very busy.

Since MTV is first and foremost a television station, they do have navigation to sites for each of the many versions MTV and to the various shows on those channels. However, television is only a small part of MTV.com. The network has evolved into the primary source of culture (pop and otherwise) for many teens and twenty-somethings, so MTV.com covers everything from movies to style to games and even some politics. They have an MTV Messenger as well as Mobile features. Links to music and video, though, is never more than a click away.

All in all, the site is designed and executed really well for its purpose – to try to transform young people into the MTV generation. They have styled the site according to young people’s tastes, kept it easy to use and navigate, and branched out to cover every aspect of the typical teen’s life.