new website - work in progress

[fusilierb]

Well I finally started working on a real website for myself this weekend. I've got most of the backend finished and am just starting on the front end (interface) now. The basic look and feel is finished and I am working on content and would love to get any feedback as the content part will be where I'm weakest.Last night I bought my domain name and pointed it to my .mac account. So this is all running off my .mac account now and I'm using iweb to do the layout and programming (which is turning out to be a nice, if not a bit limited, little web development app). I will probably get hosting space through Godaddy, as I really want a database to deliver the song content, so that I can tag all the music like a real library does and allow searches off of style, instrumentation, bpm, etc, but for now I'm going to just use the mac blogging feature to post songs. There will also be a download store developed before this is all over.I've got all the social networking ties in place so that I can post to one place and have those posts propagate out to all the other sites without me having to really spend much time managing them. ReverbNation is powering all the music related stat tracking and streaming and lastFM will be the place where all the music will be separated out in albums so that I can try to build up a streaming count with them for stronger placements. And Goggle Analytics is powering all the website stats so I can see who is visiting, where they are from and track promos, etc. That takes care of all the backend stuff. So far my total investment comes out to $14 bucks to secure the domain name for two years and & $10 bucks to purchase a decent looking template. Since I'm doing all the development, I don't really charge myself that much for programming so I can keep the costs for this down to barely nothing, which is my goal. All of the other stuff, players and mailing list signups and tracking is free, thanks social networking people and google!I now need to write a bio and nail down the wording of all the pages, my real weak spot. I will also need to finish uploading all my music and will have to write descriptions of the pieces, yuck! So if you get a chance, please check out my work in progress. I'm looking for feedback on the look and feel and the navigation through the site to see if it feels intuitive.Here it is in all its unfinished glory:www.bryanfusilier.comThanks for your time!B

[sgs4u]

May 25, 2009, 9:18am, fusilierb wrote:Any thoughts on this? I might even just put together another site that is just for the casual user where everything is downloadable for free and keep that completely separate from this more commercial endeavor.BI like the above idea. You might not want to put all your music on the free site... Keep them separate, and you might be able to watch how much stuff your giving away as well, instead of always wondering of someone's grabbing and using it. Personally, I don't worry about people stealing my music and making money with it. Have you noticed that many of the more experienced members here, don't even link anything to their music sites. Just worth noticing I think. And hey, writing bios is much easier than writing music and recording it. I saw this video from Derek Sivers, and he shares a bit of wisdom about the descpription and stuff for bios. and a bunch more videos on his blog about marketinghttp://sivers.org/soundadvice