Creating a Website

[jonnybutter]

Hey Mike, your site looks pretty great!

[mikeymike2000]

Thank you, Jonny.

I made this with a friend who used to work for a well known hosting company. Now that I know what I know I could have done this myself but we had gone through a series of more complicated than it needs to be steps.

Key is to keep it simple, pick a design you like and will stick with for a while and make it easy for yourself to maintain and add or edit stuff.

I also highly recommend Sound Cloud as the audio host and just embed into your site. I started out with an independent MP3 player and although it looked really really stunning, I found out several months after the fact that no mobile devices or MAC products would stream the music because of HTML5. This lead to a lot of research and trying different things only to end up doing what everyone else does anyway, just putting a better "face" on it.

It is a Joomla template $25 one time and less than $10 / month for hosting. Easy to use and update. Although the template I am using had a TON of stuff that I am not using, I chose it for the look and layout.

The whole point is websites are no longer a thing that should be costly for you. Giant companies will still have a hefty bill because of all the coding and content and search engine optimization etc. but for what we do here, you should be able to get up and running for not that much. Especially if you can do basic computer stuff and considering a lot of what we do is computer based, that should be no issue.

[mojobone]

My opinion, if you get domain registration from your hosting company, you're probably paying too much, or at least more than necessary, because of introductory periods and sales that will expire before your next automatic renewal and whatnot. Some things to look for are SEO (search engine optimization) Pagerank compatibility and scalability, in case you should somehow accidentally blow up. But you asked about web design, and I gotta say many if not most musicians are very aware of the visual components of their artistry and some...just don't have an eye for design. There's no easy way to tell if you're THAT guy, because your friends won't tell you if your site looks like dookie, and not in the good, Green Day way. It's hard to even know if you need help.

As a trained visual artist, I usually know what I want, but a website is not a blank sheet of paper and most sitebuilding tools don't bear the slightest resemblance to a pencil. (except there's usually a delete key, if not an actual eraser and it works way better; sometimes entirely too well) Upshot of all this is I've used Wix and got some decent-looking results, but the free versions of that and many like it have a limited number of useful textures and animations that can make you look like an also-ran, unless you either get creative or just keep it really simple, and just like with songwriting, simple is the most effective thing, but it's really hard to do well.

For me WordPress strikes a nice balance between useability and flexibility and customizing a theme with your own colors and pictures and whatnot is pretty easy, though there's a bit of a learning curve. Often you can start with a template, embed the content/components and swap in themes until you get something that pops, then adjust your colors to suit. I think the best first step is to browse and click at sites with offerings similar to what you intend and try to identify what you like and don't like, if that's not too obvious.

[LesSampou]

Thanks Mikey and Mojo,
I actually have my present site on bandzoogle and it is pretty easy, however, I"m looking to do a more complex custom looking site. But, that said, I haven't ruled out Bandzoogle yet, They are excellent people (five year relationship maybe more) who really reach out and help.
See you at the Rally?
L

[Paulie]

FWIW, I just acquired a domain name from Network Solutions (former master of all domain names). I've used them since 1997 for most of my domain purchases. This time I figured I'd try their web site tools out. I'm a huge Wordpress fan, so this solution is much more basic than what I'm used to. There are tons of pretty templates, but the editor is less than intuitive at times. If you are new to page creation you might get frustrated quickly. But with some patience you should be able to create something usable.

I'm trying to keep it simple: http://www.YoPaulieMusic.com.

[eeoo]

Hey guys - I'm totally unqualified to judge anyone's website, I thought all your sites were very nice and did the job admirably. Mike, your video on your home page was great! I put my site together using wordpress and a template i purchased (sorry, don't remember who i purchased it from). I'm SO not a web guy so i just barely cobbled it together, the point being if i can do it, anyone can do it. Anyway, I'd love to see what people think of this site, I'm trying to toe the line between artist and film/tv composer.

http://ethanokamura.com/main

Thanks guys!

[funsongs]

Hey guys - I'm totally unqualified to judge anyone's website, I thought all your sites were very nice and did the job admirably. Mike, your video on your home page was great! I put my site together using wordpress and a template i purchased (sorry, don't remember who i purchased it from). I'm SO not a web guy so i just barely cobbled it together, the point being if i can do it, anyone can do it. Anyway, I'd love to see what people think of this site, I'm trying to toe the line between artist and film/tv composer.

http://ethanokamura.com/main

Thanks guys!

Looks 'current'/cool/attractive and was simple to navigate.
Nicely done; very "professional", in my amateur opinion.
Translation: it portrays "artist" very well.

[eeoo]

Cool, thank you Peter!