Actually, now that you have put it like that, the about.me and other sites like that are pretty new and I think could serve as a good main site for lots of people. They do a really good job of aggregating things like sound cloud and twitter and iTunes store links etc and the content is therefore always pushed to it without you having to bother. I've thought of doing that myself as a main site and I don't see why something like that isn't in a lot of cases better than trying to maintain your own. Especially if your domain name redirects to it as your main site. I do think there is a level of professionalism of at least having your own domain, if nothing else for the legit looking email address.kclements wrote:Thanks for the comments. And maybe this is a silly topic. If you have a site, keep it, update it once in a while and be done with it. I just thought it might make an interesting discussion. Some more of my thoughts (or just skip to the bottom
I'm not saying you don't need a web presence and I would certainly keep my domain name. I wouldn't want to contact a library with a @gmail or @yahoo account. I think it looks more professional to have a custom domain name.
What I am asking (and not just for myself, but as a general question) is would you consider doing away with the Wordpress (or similar service, template, whatever) site, and all the maintenance that goes along with it. Even if you have to spend just 1 hour a month to make sure everything is up to date, is that too much when you are getting about 3-10 hits a week? Again, it's not about the cost in dollars. I pay $50 a year for my site with 10 email boxes, and it's a business expense at that. It's about the cost in attention and time spent dealing with possible headaches, updates and stuff.
Might you be better off having a general site, like the flavors.me site, transfer your custom domain so that it serves up that page and know it is automatically updated every time you post a track to soundcloud? If you send a contact to it, it is clear where they can click to listen - served by Soundcloud including any sets and playlists you have. Theres a clear page for bio. Clean, easy, very little maintenance and the service keeps everything (system-wise) up to date.
I used to design web sites for clients, and enjoyed playing around with the latest widgets and templates and lookie-that's. Now I am more interested in playing in Logic and writing songs.
Maybe I should have said at the beginning, I hoped this to be more of an open discussion - and not necessarily what you think I should do with my site.
Thanks again for the discussion.
kc
I think it really depends on what kind of music direction your are wanting to pursue. I think a gigging artist versus a say a composer of production music and even a concert music composer all have different audiences. I don't really expect to ever sell albums and t-shirts per say, so it's not that important to me to try to use mine for sales. Mine is more business card, demo sort of stuff. Since I'm not really selling anything off of it, the traffic to it doesn't really matter to me.
But I have done a lot of experimenting with driving traffic to my site just to see what works and what doesn't. I'm working on an iPad music theory book that I am planning on pushing through my website, so I've been preparing to push that for a while now. So when I'm done I'm going to flip the switch and utilize some these things that I've learned by playing around:
In a "sales/gig" oriented site I think its good to have a separate site that you can really control. And it's not even so much that the site itself is that important, but the search engines weigh fairly heavily on cross-linking. The more your name or company or product (hopefully clearly labeled in your domain name) is linked out to other sites which then link back to you, the higher you float to the top of search results. That's why I have a about.me, and a twitter and a Facebook and a blog on wordpress.com and on blogger.com and on and on and on. It's not because I plan on doing anything with them, but they all cross link to each other which means that if anyone types your name in google your gonna fill up the first few pages. Just makes it easier for you to be found.
I accidentally also figured out a neat little twitter trick. I have all of my RSS feeds and news apps hooked up to post articles to my twitter account. I don't really like to "tweet", but I found that if I hooked up twitter to autopost to my website, I could tweet any articles that I liked and wanted to keep from the reading apps, which would then post onto my website. Then I would use my own website as sort of a book marking service where I just go there to browse up on all the music apps and recording articles that I wanted to remember. After doing this for a couple of months I started noticing all sorts of traffic going to my site and tracked it down to people searching for search terms that were in these tweets. i.e., someone searching for an iOS app in google, my site shows up in the results.
Again, the traffic isn't doing me anything because I'm not selling anything, yet. But if I was gigging our selling albums I sure would doing more related stuff like that.
Going back to about.me and other like that, you can basically do the same sort of auto-updating thing with your own website also. Mine is pretty much on auto-pilot. I can push posts to it from Facebook and twitter. And all of the music on my site is controlled by sound cloud.
If you have a paid sound cloud account, you can create unlimited sets. I have sets for each genre and then large sets called website and demo. My site is wordpress and I just created a page for each genre and embed the html 5 code from soundcloud on each of the pages and the website set on the home page and the demo set on some other page. Now I just use sound cloud to move pieces into those sets and that instantly updates my website. Rearranging the order of the pieces on Soundcloud also has the same effect because you are literally pulling that set into your site in realtime via sound cloud.
Because its wordpress, I can also use the iPad or iPhone app to add new posts and pages. To be honest, I'm not really sure when the last time I actually edited my site from my site was. So even a self maintained site can become an automatron if you set it up right.
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