An Easy Way To Create a Website For Your Music
Having a great website is essential to having a career in the new music economy coupled with enhanced lifestyle design. Bands started with mini pages on sites like SoundClick and then graduated to more sophisticated social networks. These sites allowed the bands to showcase their pictures, top songs and showcase their live shows in addition to other stats and information.
In the late 90’s the big trend became large flash websites that were very visual heavy. These sites still take a long time to load and were bad news to fans with dial up access. The big misconception is that Google can index Flash content, and unfortunately for all the talented web designers, they cannot.
Generally, artists focus their energy on creating new music and experiences for their fans. In today’s content driven world, musicians need to be promoters just as much as they need to be musicians. You need to give your fans audio, video, pics and anything else you can create and in the format that they want, not how you want.
Using the leverage from the traffic of YouTube and Reverbnation, you now need to send them back to your site. Create videos and upload them to YouTube. Use those same YouTube videos and embed them on your forum and your main site. Put your music on Myspace, Facebook, BandCamp and other sites. Then take the widgets and embed them on your main site. This way you can leverage these large social sites and their traffic and then drive them back to your homebase.
So what do you use as your main site? Wordpress. Wordpress is an open source content management system that will allow you to easily add content, pages, blog posts and media without knowing any of the techie stuff that scares many musicians. If you can use AOL, you can easily navigate Wordresss.
Google is a fan of the Wordpress backend and your fans will love the user interface. The dashboard is very user friendly and you are free to add anything to the site that you can think of. Add videos, photos, your songs are more to your customized sidebar. The body of your site is perfect for updating shows and what is happening on tour.
Gone are the days of expensive maintenance and constant uploading to FTP clients to update your site. These days as a musician you need to be able to update your music site on the fly, making your online music marketing efforts much more effective and timely as possible.
Getting setup with Wordpress is super simple with their 5 minute installation that will have your tracks and image displayed in no time. Begin the process by grabbing the code and finding a Wordpress friendly hosting solution. There are tons of options directly on the Wordpress site. After you get your code and hosting, it is literally a few button clicks and you are ready to tell the world about your music. You are free to update at will and create as many pages and posts as you like. When you are just starting out with your band website, its good to go with a free theme to customize the look and feel. The easiest way to find free themes is to Google them.
Your time is extremely valauable as a musician. Marketing is as well. If you are a rock star in both areas, you will have a rock star career. Stop wasting time on the technical aspect of your career, and spend more taking creating amazing music and great content. Use this and your online music marketing will start to skyrocket.