Archive

Posts Tagged ‘website design’

An Easy Way To Create a Website For Your Music

December 10th, 2009

The Top Website Service For Musicians

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.

Computers and Technology , , , , ,

The Problem With Squeeze Pages

November 5th, 2009

If squeeze pages are used right they will be super effective, and one of your most important business tools.

Yet most website owners are passing up a fortune in revenue, every time a sale is made, since they fail to acquire the customer’s email address, and this is just sheer madness.

The main goal of a squeeze page is to persuade your website visitor to enter their name, and email address, so that they can subscribe to your mailing list.

Squeeze pages can also earn you loads of money in possible sales, even just by collecting the website visitors contact details. You can offer a free gift in return for the website visitor subscribing to your list. List building must be one of the building blocks of any online enterprise, for the reason that you can keep returning to your list with offers, and at some point move your list members to your buyers’ list, and that means cash in your bank.

You can provide a free download of a report, ebook, software, and so on in return for the website visitor’s name and email address. The higher the perceived value of the product, or the desire for the product, will improve the chance of your website visitor filling in your squeeze page form, and clicking the submit button.

The key thing is to keep the entire proceedure as simple as can be for your website visitor, yet most businesses complicate their squeeze pages and confuse the website visitor.

You need an eye-catching headline that holds the attention of your website visitors. You want to have an compelling sub-heading, describing your give-away.

Your opt-in form should not ask for too many details. A name, and email address, should be adequate for your marketing strategies. If you ask for too many details your website visitor may lose interest and exit your squeeze page.

Keep your message concise and straightforward, stating the message – please enter your details to receive your free report/ebook/software.

Your Squeeze pages must be free of diversions such as flash graphics, navigational links, or advertisements The plan is to keep your website visitors paying attention, and stop them from clicking off your squeeze page, so you shouldn’t offer them any diversions. You want them to concentrate on your offer. The only option you want to give your website visitors is to sign up, or exit your squeeze page.

If you have spent time and money to get prospects to your website, you do not want anyone to go away without signing up to your opt-in list. Everyone on your opt-in list is worth income for you in potential sales, so you need to do everything that you can to guarantee that your website visitors fill in your opt-in form.

It is well known that companies invest a lot of their advertising budget having their squeeze pages built to make sure their conversion rates are of a high percentage. But a profitable, high percentage converting, squeeze page does not have to cost a bundle of cash. Instead of using someone else, you could create your own squeeze pages.

Then, why isn’t every online business using squeeze pages? Well, simply since dynamic, and successful, squeeze pages can be challenging to create, and it can take a lot of effort to get them working correctly.

Now, with new development in squeeze page software programs, there are easy and low cost solutions for designing high converting squeeze pages. Streets Ahead Software has just recently produced a new software, called Squeeze Page Wizard, and it produces amazing squeeze pages instantly. You do not need to know a thing about HTML coding, or website design, to produce amazing looking squeeze pages in no time at all, using this software program. It is a simple point and click software program that creates professional looking squeeze pages at the click of a button.

Computers and Technology , , , , ,

Website Design in Gainesville in 2009 & Beyond

September 14th, 2009

There is a pretty good number of companies that do website design in Gainesville, so choosing can sometimes be difficult. Starting out with a clear vision of a website will certainly help you to attract the right person for the job.

Think about this… If your business doesn’t already occupy a spot on the internet, you are getting passed up by boat loads of potential new customers. More people than ever before are surfing the internet due to the current economic downturn. The internet blows the phone book away and people would rather search and lookup things this way because of images video and more.

Your website is the portal to beam your talents, goods, and services to the rest of the world. It sends a message to people with your personality and the ways that you can help them. The internet will not limit you to doing just “in person” business. It will allow you to gain time, because a website works for you twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.A website can do a bunch of things for you including information capture and sales, when it is set up properly.

Some people misunderstand website design and development. Lots of people are designing websites, and almost anyone can do it. You should understand that your website will be worthless without a plan to market it. Having a site without a marketing plan is like having a canoe without a paddle, or like having an amusement park with no guests.

Some designers understand that, and others don’t. Knowing this can put you well on your way to finding the right person to build the website you envisioned. By acting now and starting this process, you will move ahead with the times while other get left behind.

Computers and Technology , , , ,