Friday, October 17, 2008

HMMagazine.com

HM Magazine is part of a select number of Christian music magazines that cover more than just Christian music.

Confusing, maybe. But the magazine's site offers not just the Christian music reviews you'd expect, but also mainstream music reviews and interviews, mainstream movie reviews and more. The interviews are especially noteworthy, as they're conducted in a trademark witty manner that seems to get artists to loosen up and share some really insightful stuff. In fact, I enjoy the non-Christian artist interviews probably the most since it's a regular practice to find out their views on Jesus, something you won't get in Rolling Stone.

The Internet exclusives are mostly news updates between magazine releases but they do offer some fresh content on an intermittent basis. Physical magazine sales are clearly the priority but the online version offers enough content to be worthwhile even to non-subscribers without lessening the value of buying the handheld version.

The only major criticism I would offer is that the website was evidently designed for a minimized browser window format, as the content is squeezed into a column about half the maximized screen. The column is the size of a YouTube embedded video, which makes for a clean look when there are videos on the page, but since there aren't many, elsewhere it just feels like a small screen.

The ads are small and there aren't too many of them , probably since it's not a heavy traffic site.

I enjoy HM's website but probably more for the content than for the presentation. A few minor fixes could greatly improve its look.

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