How To Make A Music Website
If you are a musician, you should have a website; this is a basic fact of the digital age, and it’s becoming more important with each passing day. Fortunately, creating your own website is also becoming cheaper and easier with each passing day…
All Over The Web
There are plenty of websites where you can post your music – I previously created a list of 117 sites for promoting your music – and it is certainly a good idea to have a presence on as many of these as possible.
Despite its ongoing decline, a MySpace page is still a must for any artist, as is the new behemoth of music sharing, SoundCloud.
Maintain Control of Your Web Presence
However, in order to truly control your image and presence on the Web, you should have your very own website and your own domain name. It’s not hard to do, but the range of options can often induce paralysis (รก la the paradox of choice).
Basically, you need a domain name, a hosting provider and a CMS (content management system).
Domain names and hosting are usually bundled together, so it’s just a case of choosing a reliable provider. I’ve used ace-host.net for the past six years now, and they’ve been entirely reliable in that time (hopefully I won’t jinx myself by saying that now!). Shaun Letang over at MTT recommends justhost, so they may be worth a look also.
For content management, you can hand code your pages in HTML if you want maximum security and minimum maintenance, but otherwise WordPress is an excellent (and free) system. You can customise it with a huge variety of themes, and add functionality with plugins. Just remember to upgrade your WordPress install – and any plugins – whenever a new version becomes available. It’s largely an automated process these days, and helps ensure you won’t be vulnerable to legacy hacker exploits.
A Little Bit Extra
Just having a website isn’t enough – you need people to be able to find it. Linkdisco provides an introduction to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) for musicians, and some tips for setting up a WordPress install.
Online, an email list is a powerful marketing tool – make sure you get fans’ email addresses at every opportunity. MailChimp is a free (for the introductory package) email marketing service that offers everything you need to get started.
Of course, you might also want to actually sell music on your site. Bandcamp offer a sales service that you can incorporate quite easily, but if you want an alternative option then E-Junkie is also a strong contender…