Arts & Entertainment

Tips On How To Make Your Bands Website Work For You

Written by juicebox on April 28, 2008 12:15 pm EST

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Band websites can be a major point of promotion for any band. If you take good care in creating and maintaining it, it can be your strongest tool in your promotional arsenal.

So what makes a good Band website? How can you improve your current one? Well that’s what this post focuses on today exactly. So sit back, and enjoy.
Keep It Clean and Organized

No doubt, most Bands have a lot of information that they want to put out there. Don’t think of your websites as just a dumping ground for it. If you just throw up information, expect visitors to flee in fear of it. Presenting the information in a clear and organized way is key.

The Basic Sections Every Band Should Have

Home Page
Band Bio (and Member Bio)
Photo Gallery
Discography Section
Music Videos (If you have them)
Downloads (If you offer them, I’d recommend it)
Promotional (Flyers in PDF, Banner Ad’s for sites, etc.)
Shop
Shows
Contact

Make It a Reflection of Your Band

Make sure your color scheme and imaging on your website represents your band in a manner you want it to. For example, if you’re a punk band, make it look punk how you envision it. The design and overall aesthetics of a website are just as important as its organization.
The Home Page is Your Most Important Page

Many Bands feel like their Home Page is the last thing that is important to them, and instead focus on other aspects of their site. The Home Page is where 90% of your visitors will more than likely land on when looking for your band, so make it count. A good Homepage will have the following:

The Latest News
Link to Current Album Information
A Nice Image of the Band
Link to Current Music Video
Link to Outside Social Networks

Be Respectful. Put Parental Advisory Disclaimers on Explicit Content

Don’t think of putting a disclaimer about explicit content in some (or all) songs as being censored. It’s by far not. However, some visitors may be at work or school when they are checking you out. Last thing they may need is some expletive being screamed through their speakers when they are not expecting it.

In addition, some filtering websites will block websites that do not disclose such information. So reduce your chances, and put some kind of notice. I’ve noticed some bands putting a * next to songs that have explicit content and then explaining what kind of content.

It’s safer in the long run to your promotional campaign, to do it right the first time, then to spend hours, days, or even weeks getting de-listed for something as simple as a disclaimer.
Make Discography Pages Detailed

When a visitor visit’s your Discography page, there is some content that they should expect to see. That is:

Album Art (a link to a larger version of the image is good as well)
Track Listing and Run Times
Lyrics
Purchase Links
Release Date

In addition to these items, consider making PDF’s of your inserts and posting those as well. You can also provide links to track previews. Not sure what to use to play track previews on your site? Wimpy Media Player to the rescue! Wimpy Media Player is Flash-Based which means 99% of your visitors will be able to hear it, regardless of platform.

If you are providing one of the tracks as a Free Download, making a link to it here will also be good. Free Tracks can be a great promotional tool for any Band.
Downloads on Your Site

If you are going to offer Free Track Downloads on your website, don’t make it cheap. What I mean is that, don’t encode an MP3 in 128 Kbps and expect that your visitors will download it. In fact, they may not even listen to it because it’s encoded that low. If you are going to offer a Download, Make it a 320 Kbps MP3, or even better FLAC it.

Band’s who embrace lossless or near lossless quality files tend to be traded more online between friends. That trading gets you more fans, and more fans mean more revenue.
Stay on the Sidelines of P2P or Embrace It

The status of trading music has not changed. Since the years of the Tape Recorder, the RIAA and major labels have been hell bent in trying to stop the free trade of music. In fact, Copyright Law stipulates that it is not considered copyright infringement unless money trades hands. The newer laws lobbied by the RIAA make it hard to contemplate what is and is not considered infringement, so taking a stance against P2P will be a public relations disaster. Look at the Band Metallica, who got a swift backlash from their fans for being against P2P.

If you’re wondering, here’s a simple fact on P2P. P2P has only decreased sales on Popular Artists, yet made Independent Artists sales boom. Why is that? Simple. When fans get a chance to hear the whole album, it lets them make a better informed purchase.

So why would Popular Artist sales decrease? Because their album contains no substance beyond the three singles that are on that Album. The rest of it was just kind of thrown together in haste. When fans discover that, they are less inept at buying the Album and instead buy a few tracks on a website, or download it, thus lower sales.

There has yet to be any solid proof that P2P has hurt the Record Industry. In fact, they hurt themselves more than any outside thing ever has.
Get In the Technology Age – Vlog It Baby!

Vlog. That’s right. Grab a video camera at your nearest electronics store, and get to vlogging. Similar to blogging, except it’s in video, and everyone loves video. With a Vlog, you can turn it into a podcast, and then that Podcast can be pimped all over the web, on sites such as iTunes, Feedburner, and others. Not to mention, the power of social bookmarking sites like Twitter and Digg.
Get your RSS in Gear

Make your band’s news into an RSS feed. Then make it visible on your site, so users can add it to their reader. Next thing you know, more people know about your news quicker.

In addition, a well managed RSS feed can be your core connection with the Press. When you consider music journalists, they have hundreds, if not thousands of Bands that they go through. Allowing them to just subscribe to your feed makes sure that when your news is updated, that they get notified immediately. It reduces your promotional overhead, and increases their efficiency.

However, don’t abuse RSS or your News posts in general. If your news post seems more personal than band-oriented, or something that won’t be important to the media, don’t push it into your RSS.

RSS empowered feed’s also allow major music sites to be able to just mix your news in with their usual news feed. This will increase your promotions immensely. I know of several Broadcasting Agencies who now ping RSS feeds, and add News Stories from them to their sites.
Make Yourself Reachable and Respond Quickly

It’s understandable that many Bands don’t put up contact information because they don’t want to be bombarded by their “loving fans”. Let’s make this simple.

If it takes work to find your contact information, you will receive much less press. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve searched for a bands contact information because I wanted to promote them on my radio stations, and there was no contact info to be found.

Some even only post their manager’s information, and their manager is impossible to get ahold of. Think of it this way. If you have trouble reaching them, so will we. So just slam up your information, and if you get a lot of emails deal with it.

In addition, don’t respond to e-mails once every few weeks. Try and check it every day if possible. The more you monitor the communications, the less you have to deal with at one time, and the quicker response means that chance between being featured in next month’s Alternative Press mag or not.
Some Other Quick Tips

Music videos should be encoded in FLV (Flash Video). FLV has the greatest footprint in terms of players than any other format, and is cross-compatible on practically every computing platform.

If you post videos in your News, and it syndicates to your RSS feed, consider posting the video on a site such as YouTube, so that it reduces your potential bandwidth on your site.

Avoid forums. They offer very little traffic. If you want to have some kind of open communication on your band, make a page with Questions and Answers.

Anti-hot linking of your images is not recommended. Sure, it takes bandwidth, but its good bandwidth, because it is showing your Band.

Make promotional banners clean and fresh. Make sure they get to the point, and keep them named universal. (Ex: band_468.jpg). Provide a snippet of code for your visitors to put on their sites providing the right links and images. It makes it easier for them, and for you, because when they are hot-linked to your site, you can now update the images without having to contact them.

Don’t let your Meta Tags be unoriginal. It’s best to make sure your Meta Tags are detailed so that search engines can read your site better. Consider an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or SEM (Search Engine Marketing) expert even.

Put your news stories on their own pages. A snippet of text, leading to a larger post is best with news. Make sure your full story is in your RSS feed however. Also, when news gets old, put it on an archive page, don’t delete it. It could be providing you some valuable incoming traffic.

Get a newsletter going on your website. It helps get the word out, and keep everyone in the loop. Make it look sexy too. Don’t slap a bunch of text in an e-mail and then expect it gain a lot of returns.

Post show information as soon as possible and make sure to have Location, Prices, Age Restrictions, and any other types of restrictions. Fans hate last minute things like “no wallet chains because they might choke somebody”. Just wait until they ban hands.

When choosing a webhost, choose one that offers a lot of bandwidth or transfer per month. Monitor it closely so that you can increase it as necessary to prevent your website from being suspended.

So those are my tips on what makes a good Band website. Making yourselves unique is important, but making sure your site is easy for visitors as well. These tips should help you along that path and also help you avoid a potential Public Relations disaster.
Have you got some idea’s on what makes a good Band website? I’d love to hear them! Comment on this story with your idea’s or other cool resources for Band websites!

Learn The 10 Things that Independent Artists and Musicians Should Know.

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Some Quick Resources for Your Band’s Site

So if you want to get your site up as soon as possible, you can throw these little programs into your site to make it a little easier to setup.

Gallery 2
An awesome Photo Gallery program, based in PHP.

AddThis
A simple little widget that be applied to pages so that they can be bookmarked or promoted on any social media site.
Wimpy Media Player
Allows you to post and play Video and Audio on your website, with the greatest coverage of any other player.

Wordpress
If you want to blog it and don’t want to update your files every now and then, use this handy CMS.

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