Structure Of A Successful Music Website


Ideally each page of your website should serve a specific purpose. The main purpose of the sales page for your cd is to sell the cd. If have a page with Google Adsense, the main purpose is to generate money by to get people to click on the advertisement. If its not an important part of the process, don't load up the page with unnecessary things like animations or sounds. This will only distract visitors from achieving the task laid out for them, ie. buying your product.

Below are some ideas to include in your website and the main purpose of each.

1) Main Page

The main pages is a general landing page to funnel visitors to different areas of your site. Create a clear and easy navigation process linked to the other pages of your site. *If you use Javascript for navigation, place text link at the bottom. This ensures that search engines will be able to spider your site properly. You could also use this page to feature your cd, music samples and other offers.

2) Order Page(s)

Create a sales letter for each item that your are selling. Tomorrow we'll go over some copywriting tips to build a successful order page.

3) Press Releases

This section is where visitors can read 3rd party articles published about you, increasing your credibility and exposure.

4) Contact Information

This is so people can get a hold of you to book shows, ask questions about products, collaborations, interviews or other opportunities (you never know). Include as much contact information as possible, like your phone, cell, mailing address, email etc.

5) Privacy Policy

Complies with privacy laws if your are collecting any of information about your customers/visitors. This also helps to build trust and people will give their information more freely. Here's a link to a privacy policy generator. http://www.the-dma.org/privacy/creating.shtml

6) Electronic Press Kit

This is where you refer the media to easily download an information package about you.

Here's some ideas on what you can include:

*Biography
*Demo Songs
*Pictures
*Reviews/Testimonials
*Sideshow Of Photos
*Video or Film Footage (Windows Media or Quicktime format)

Create a biography with pictures in .pdf format and make it available for download. You can use the Writer program contained in the free Open Office Suite http://www.openoffice.org to do this. Open then program type (or paste) in your biography and insert pictures. When your done go to File > Export As PDF.

7) Lyrics

Allows fans to get more familiar with your music. Also adds content to your site which will get picked up by the search engines if it has an incoming link form your main page or somewhere else.

8) Biography

On your bio page sections fans read about you and see your pictures. A sideshow of your photos sometimes adds a nice touch.

9) Concert Listings/News

Keep your fans and site visitors updated with the latest news about your concerts/shows, interviews, appearances ond other topics of interest.

10) Forum

A discussion forum is a great place for you to interact with your fans and street teams. An excellent free script to set up a forum is phpBB http://www.phpbb.com.

11) Blog

Blogging is a good way to syndicate your artist/band news and generate traffic for your site. Search engines love this kind of stuff. Later on in the course I'll go a bit more in dept on setting up a blog. A nice fully featured blogging script is Word Press http://www.wordpress.org

Make sure your each page of your site is cross browser functional, meaning it can be viewed properly by different web browser programs. Two of most popular ones are Internet Explorer and Firefox http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox. Sometimes a site will show up perfectly in IE but will be all out of whack when viewed in Firefox, or vise versa. Have both browsers installed and check out every page.

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Dan Meiyers
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