One of the most important things you can do as a musician is have a website. Your website is your store front. Facebook and twitter are all well and good but they are trends and at sometime will disappear. Having a yourname.com website will always be there with your music, biography, discography, news, techspecs etc. It also looks good to send promotors to your website when they are looking for information.
A few years ago you had to know lots of html code to make a website but while having some html knowledge helps you don’t need it nowadays. You can use WordPress (this site is wordpress) or Wix is also popular (check out www.findlaynapier.com or www.paddycallaghan.com). There are plenty of other options as well if you look.
WordPress
As said above this is what all Hands Up for Trad websites are based on.
Wordpress offers you a backend database option which means that you have a backend of your website that controls what the public side looks like. It sounds complicated but is actually very easy. There are two kinds of WordPress – WordPress.com and WordPress.org. The difference is that wordpress.com is a free service (Wix offer this as well) and your website is hosted on their servers. Your website domain would look like handsupfortrad.wordpress.com. It is slightly limited in terms of plugins and widgets compared to wordpress.org.
WordPress.org is wordpress hosted on your own domain. To make this work you would go to a hosting company like Bluehost.com and buy your preferred domain. You would then install wordpress on the domain. Again this sounds very complicated however hosting companies like Bluehost make this very easy. You just go to your control panel and install WordPress. In my opinion this is the better way to go as your website will have lots of functionality. You can download themes to make it look the way you want it, install plugins and widgets to make it do things you want it to.
Here is a wordpress.com tutorial made by Scottish firm Inner Ear. It’s very good and the same techniques work for a wordpress.org website as well.
http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/innerear/build-your-own-portfolio-website
Wix.com offers drag and drop functionality. Findlay Napier said when designing www.findlaynapier.com that he just dragged the widgets he wanted on to the page.
http://www.wix.com
Whatever website type you choose the most important thing you can do is tell people about it. After you have written about yourself, uploaded some music etc you need to let people see it. This is where social media comes in handy. What I would do is write a blog post and then share it on FaceBook or Twitter or Tumbler or anything else current trying to get people to click on the links back to your website. When people visit your website you want to try and collect their email address. This way you don’t have to rely on them coming back to read your news. You can just send it to their inbox where they can click on the link and view your news, buy your music etc.
If you would like any more advice please get in touch.