Introduction

The Internet offers an inexpensive way to market and sell your music, advertise your performance schedule and contact your fans. It can also act as a contact point for venue and event booking agents or other music professionals. Here I offer some common sense advice on building a website.

You're The Boss

If you hire someone to build your website don't give them free reign in its design. Tell them how you want it to look and function. There are a lot of web designers who can skillfully add a lot of neat effects but those effects might not serve your purposes. Your site should accomplish the following: Advertise you and your music, Sell your music and be a contact point. To do this your site should be focused, simple and easy to maneuver in.

What Should Be Included

Your site should include a Home Page, Biography Page, Calendar Page, Fan Page, Music Page and a Contact Page. A visitor should be able to access all pages from any one page with one click. Each page should be based on the same template. That is, you should choose a site theme and use it for all pages.

Choose colors and fonts so that text is not just easy to read but is pleasant to read. If you have a dark background don't pick a dark font color. Also, stick to one size font and limit the use of bold, italics and other highlighting effects.

Animation should rarely if ever be used. It slows down the site and it detracts from the site's purpose. Audio, music or sound effects, should only initiate when a visitor performs a clearly understood action. Some people might be visiting you site while at work and you don't want them to get in trouble.

Home Page

This is the entry point for your site. It should identify you or your band, the type of music you play and display any pictures logos or graphics.

Biography Page

Here is pictured you and/or band members with interesting, but not long-winded, biographies. Include any meaningful awards you've won and link band member names to email posts.

Calendar Page

Post at least two months worth of performance events. Calendars are more easily understood if they are presented in the usual boxed-calendar format. As an added extra you might include a link from each venue to its Map Quest map page-this is a freebee service offered by Map Quest.

Fan Page

This is a good place to acknowledge your fans. You could post promotions and display pictures of your most recent performances. You might offering a few guest passes for a performance to some of your fans and then post their pictures. Some sites also include discussion forms but that might be risky. If the form is not busy it gives the appearance that you don't have many fans.

Music Page

Picture each project, list its tracks and offer some audio samples. Some artists offer short song snippets. I like allowing the whole song but having a center portion overdubbed with the artist's name, song title and CD title. This discourages downloading but lets the visitor get a better feel for your work. You might also consider displaying the lyrics.

The music page is also where you sell your projects. You can sell CDs directly from your site, you can sell them through one or more online distributors or both. If you sell only through your site you need to have a shopping cart that is secure and accepts all forms of payment (checks and credit cards). If you want to use an online distributor investigate first. There are a number of distributors and they offer different services and changed a range of fees. Frankly, some well-known distributors charge artists too much for too little.

You should have two types of links from your music page. The obvious link is to your distributor but you should also have links to some other artists' websites. This is a good way to generate traffic. Trade links with artists you know that also play your genre of music. You're really not in competition with them and each of you can benefit from the others fan base.

Contact Page

Here list all the contact information for bookings, management, record label and so on. Include headings, street addresses, phone numbers and email addresses.