M I SPY Editor’s Note: In our June issue, MI Spy reviewed Minneapolis-area websites. This month, MI Spy reviews four more sites and selects a winner among all nine websites presented both this month and last month.
Twin Town Guitars twintown.com
Visit the Twin Town Guitars website, and you’ll immediately be greeted by a scrolling carousel of clickable images accompanied by clear, concise messages about the store’s deals and services. When MI Spy visited the site, these links included “Online Lessons” and “Quarantunes,” which demonstrated that the store is already reaching out to us in our socially distanced lairs. And the promise of “Curbside Pickup: Monday through Friday, noon to 5 p.m.” is another very good way for the store to show its adaptability. At the top of the site is the store’s logo and slogan: “Keeping Your Life Loud & Local Since 1997.” Twin Town’s website offers a wide variety of instruments and accessories, and the homepage has a clean layout. One of the first things I clicked on was the “About Us” section, and I was pleased to see that the page recaps the store’s history, and it even mentions that it has solar panels on its roof (more signs of modernity and adaptability!). A bit of the store’s pedigree is also mentioned in that it is “picking up where the legendary Benedict’s Guitar Shop left off in 1995.” Overall, Twin Town’s website is inviting and well organized. It is easy to navigate, and its dropdown menus work well. For each type of instrument or accessory, there are easily accessed options to limit your search results on the left-hand side of the page (including options to limit your results by category, price and brand). One minor quibble is that, in the search results, the prices are listed in a lighter gray font and are harder to read than the names and descriptions of the items for sale. Sweep your mouse over an item’s image and “Quickview” will appear; click on that button, and it will open a popup with some information about the chosen product.
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A Virtual Visit to Minneapolis MI Stores, Part 2
You can also get more detailed information by clicking on the image or the product name, or by clicking “View more details” in the “Quickview” pop-up. Twin Town’s website offers up electric and acoustic guitars, basses, amps, effects pedals, drums, keyboards and a variety of accessories. Within the acoustic designation, you can see banjos, dulcimers, ukuleles, mandolins, harmonicas, resonators and even sitars. It also offers band and orchestra instruments such as violins, violas, cellos, upright
basses, clarinets, flutes, saxophones, trumpets and trombones. In addition, they do repairs for all types of instruments. As for depth of inventory, electric and acoustic guitars, as well as drums, are best represented here. The store offers products covering many prices; for acoustic guitars, it has a $99 guitar as well as some over $3,000. It sells new as well as used instruments and equipment. There are dozens upon dozens of guitars offered here, as well as basses. Some instruments have more limited sup-
ply, such as banjos, saxophones and woodwind instruments. Twin Town offers private lessons and classes, for both children and adults, for several instruments and genres, including jazz and blues. It even features a few tribute groups (including The Blues Brothers, CAKE and Juanes). They also have workshops and seminars, and a songwriting course. (These offerings may be handled differently during the pandemic, so contact the store for precise details.) The site lists 30 different music instructors, male JULY 2020
