How To Build A Music Website cont...
How To Build A Music Website cont...
Share Buttons Simple Use. Social sharing buttons are essential for any website these days. You will want your fans to share your pages and blog posts, so add these sharing buttons to them. This will make it easier for people to share, and remind them that sharing is an option.
Subscribe To Comments. If you are going allow people to leave comments on your website, you will want to include this plugin. What is does is allow your visitors to subscribe to the comments conversation, so they are emailed when any new comments are left on that page. This is perfect for encouraging repeat visitors to your site, and getting them involved in what you’ re doing.
Post Videos And Photo Galleries. If you want to add a cool picture gallery to your website, this is the plugin to do that. It will display thumbnails of your pictures, which grows in size as your visitors click to view them. Pretty neat.
Akismet. This is the first of two plugins I recommend for keeping your site safe and secure. What Akismet does is stop spam comments appearing on your website. While WordPress makes it so you have to approve comments before they are added, it gets annoying getting emails about new comments to approve then realizing they’ re spam. Akismet stops this from happening, and automatically blocks comments from known spammers. An essential plugin.
Login Lockdown. This is the second of two plugins I recommend for keeping your site safe and secure. What Login Lockdown does is make it so that if a hacker tries to log into your site, they will be stopped. Hackers are known to try and log into other people’ s sites using software that tries thousands of password combinations until it gets the right one. This plugin will stop that and make your site a lot more secure.
About. If you want people to really connect with you and your music, you have to give off a certain image. Using your About page, you can tell them what There are a lot more plugins you can you’ re about and have them feel like use as well, and if you want your web- they know you that bit better. If some- 36 Independent Artist Magazine www. indieartmag. com
site to have a specific function, most likely there’ s a plugin for that. Have a search of the plugin marketplace in your WordPress Dashboard to see some of the options.
Creating Important Pages Now your website is looking nice and functioning well through the use of WordPress plugins, the next thing we need to do is fill it out with pages. In WordPress, pages are what you’ ll use to create any page you want to always appear in the same place on your site. If you want to create a blog with regularly updated news and information, you can publish each blog post via the post section. The latest blog post will always appear at the top of the page, and other blog posts get pushed down as new ones come along.
For now though, let’ s look at what pages you should make.
While there are a number of pages you can make depending on what you want to achieve with your site, there are a few basic pages that all website should have. These are listed below.
Home. Your home page is the first page people will come to if they type in www. Yourwebsite. com. Because of this, it’ s important that you make this page very useful, and provide links to other important areas of your site. Usually your home page will either have your latest blog posts( If you want to have a blog on your site that is), or like I said a page with links back to important pages. You may want to have one of your videos there, as well as a link back to a page with more of your videos. Or how about a link to your shop page and about page? You can do this however you want. Be sure to just give them a few main options however, rather then giving them every link to all your pages at once.
one knows about you and they take to you, it’ ll be a lot easier to turn that person into a life long fan.
Shop. If you have music to sell( Which you hopefully should) you will need to include a shop page. On this shop page you can either include links to where people can buy your music on iTunes / Amazon MP3 etc, or you can sell your own digital downloads directly from your site. I’ ll show you how to do both in the‘ Selling Your Music On Your Site’ section below.
Songs And Videos. If you haven’ t got many songs or videos, you may want to merge these two pages together so your website looks more full. If you have a lot of both however and want to make things a bit more clear, you may want to make these two pages separate. As the name suggests, one of these pages will have your songs for people to hear, and the other will have your videos. I wouldn’ t suggest you give away too many of your songs on this page; Instead give away a few samples then direct them to your shop page or mailing list to get more. We talk a lot more about this strategy in the IMA Music Business Academy.
Gallery. If you have any pictures you want to share with fans, this is the page to put them on. You can add a neat looking picture gallery using the‘ Post Videos And Photo Galleries’ plugin I mentioned above.
Contact. Having a contact page is pretty standard on most websites these days. You’ ll want one of these so people can contact you about any bookings, and make connections with you in terms of the music business. It’ ll also be handy for receiving fan mail, although you may want to make have a option for people to make it clear what they’ re contacting you for on this form. This will make it easier for you to filter mail based on what the person is contacting you for.