The site has wonderfully simple navigation, albeit with a garish color scheme, from either a roll over nav bar on the left or a drop-down menu on the top, both of which appear on every page. Plus, the top music news headlines scroll across the top left of every page and are hyperlinked. Even with a multitude of images, most are only about double thumbnail size and pages loaded quickly for me on dial-up at home as well as the dedicated connection at my office. From the home page, the site is further divided into four primary vertical themes: news, reviews, features and charts. Or, you can get a sub-directory homepage by genre with these same four themes for indie, dance, pop, metal, hip hop, classic rock or soul. This is a great user-friendly feature that allows you to bypass, say, the screaming headlines about Marylin Manson for the screaming headlines about Badly Drawn Boy.

Popular features from the magazine carry over to the web site with the added benefit of online search capabilities. The ultra-comprehensive gig guide is searchable by band or one of nine regions (but why not by venue, too?) with hyperlinks to buy tickets for every listed gig. Similarly the "Pick of the Week" is reprinted online. One of the primary reasons I like NME is their abundance of gig reviews. They seem to have correspondents everywhere and at nme.com at least half of the concert reviews are from outside the UK. The big charts are available, too: top a lbums and singles for the UK, indie, rock, R'n'B, dance and compilation albums (a huge retail category as compared to the US). I couldn't find an easy way to search chart archives though, a surefire internet-friendly advantage that nme.com should take advantage of.

One place nme.com takes great advantage of internet capabilities is multi-media. To date, this is the site where I have had the fewest difficulties listening and viewing on dial-up at home. Granted the video on 56k modem was patchy and full of jump cuts, but I did get the general gist -- and saw the haunting pro-Lyndon Johnson "daisy" ad at the beginning of Fatboy Slim's video for "Sunset (Bird of Prey)" -- and there were no cut-outs so I could hear the song, regardless of being able to see the video. Call me crazy, but that's the reason I listen to music. Web casts, however, are a co-brand with virtuetv.com and there were more of the usual "net congestion" glitches associated with at-home connectivity. On the whole, though, a thumbs-up.

There are a raft of "microsites" mostly revolving about the bigger artists in the NME universe, though the choices seem a bit arbitrary: top albums, Radiohead, the Ash tour page. Curious. And the content therein, especially on the band sites, is a bit thin, though well-intentioned, with links to reviews, the e-commerce area, polls of site users as to their favorite tracks from the discography, etc. It just seems that there isn't enough material in most cases to warrant a special area. The discussion sections are full of your garden variety posts about bands; nothing special, not even the "Angst" board that I thought had great promise from the name.

The attempts at building community are still in their nascent stages. You can personalize your nme.com experience by receiving email on specific bands, headlines or chart info, but can't have a dedicated MyNME homepage with that same info. And, unfortunately, you cannot input the bands you're interested in, but can only choose from the limited selection offered (Sleater-Kinney, yes, but Sonic Youth, no?). Also, there seems to be a goal of letting registered users submit reviews and subsequently be rated by others visiting the site, but that functionality is not operational yet.