Starting A Web Site For Your Band by Matthew Mella The web's an essential tool for bands when it comes to promotion, and a web site is increasingly important for a band to get recognised. Here's a less than complete guide, mainly centering on the design issues involved in setting up a site for your band. Why use the internet?    There are two main reasons why every band should consider getting themselves on the Internet. One is the fact that people can access your information at any time, and the other is cost. Once it's online, your web site will allow thousands to read your biog and listen to your tracks - how much would you have to spend on CD-Rs/cassettes and photocopies to do that otherwise?    Getting online    In order to get your site online, then you need web space. You can either pay for this from people such as UK2 [link], One&One [link] or Supanames [link], or you can get free hosting from companies like Geocities [link], Tripod [link] or Brinkster [link]. You may also find that your ISP allows you a certain amount of web space.    It is worth remembering, however, that most web hosts have a user agreement that may prevent you from hosting certain things. This is usually adult sites, MP3s or even foul language in the case of some free hosts. Always check out the terms and conditions before applying.     To get a domain name (yourband.co.uk for instance), either it's bought along with the web space, or if you're using a free host, then you can buy one seperately (from the same sort of people who provide paid hosting) and then redirect to the address of your free web space.     Software and tools    To make a web page, you can type the code by hand in Notepad, or if you'd prefer not to, WYSIWYG packages like Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft Frontpage Express can create pages quickly and easily. Pages are saved as HTML files (.htm or .html) and there are endless resources for learning about HTML on the internet so a quick search for "HTML" and "tutorial" in google should get you started.    For images, there are many different editors that will do the job, such as Adobe Photoshop, MGI Photosuite, Corel Painter or GIMP. The chances are that you may already have one on your computer, or on a disc from a PC magazine.    If you want to encode MP3s to put on your site, programs such as winamp [link] can "rip" tracks directly from a CD.    To upload files to your web space, you will need an FTP client, like Ipswitch's WS FTP [link] (which is free for personal use).    What you need and don't need on a site    Try and imagine what you'd like to see on the site if you weren't in the band and were just visiting. Do you need lyrics or individual biographies for the members? Do you need all the setlists from your gigs? Strip the site down to the bare minimum you need and then add what else you have useful content for or know you can keep updated otherwise - you can easily clutter a web page. A good starting point would be these four simple categories:    Home/news (including gigs)  Biography  Music (If you put MP3s on, or gives details on where to buy CDs)  Contact    These are the four main ares that you arguably need on a site. Other areas you can add as you go along.     Forthcoming gigs should obvious, appearing on the front page, or the top of the news page. It's best to send visitors straight to the news page of the site rather than a splash page ("enter here" page) or a biography page, although a short description of the band, such as "melodic rock from Sheffield" along with the logo on every page is helpful. If you decide to use a plug-in dependent package like Flash to create the site, then it's courteous to use a splash page to give people the option of downloading the plug-in if they do not have it.    Also, if a section is empty then it's best to leave it off entirely, rather than put the section up and putting "coming soon". This has a tendency to frustrate people.    Navigation and usability    Navigation describes the way that the links and menus take you around the site. There should be a menu with all major links that appears on every page in the same place and the same order. This will prevent your visitors from getting lost. The home page should be the first page you visit, and you should be able to get back to this from anywhere in a single click. Big button graphics that take ages to load are a no-no too, and if images are used for links in this way, keep the file sizes small (more on images later).    Another main factor in the design of any site is readability. Why are so many sites made with black text on a white page? Because it's easiest to read! Always make sure that the colours work well together and don't clash, and that the text is big enough but not too big. Also cater for people surfing the web at low screen resolutions - there's still a few people out there using 640x480.     Music    As mentioned above, some hosts (especially free hosts) do not allow you to upload MP3s. This is the main music file format distributed over the net due to the fact that they are fairly small, but still retain a lot of quality. If you wish to host your music in this format, make sure there are no restrictions on you webspace in this way before signing up - this should be in the user agreement or terms and conditions if there are.    It's important that people can hear your stuff over the net, even if you only supply 30 second snippets. The general rule of MP3s is that they are about a megabyte a minute in filesize, so that's the kind of download people will expect to see.    Because web servers can only deal with a certain amount of data, split between all it's users, then "bandwith" restrictions are usually set up. Hosting MP3s, could, if they prove popular, dramatically increase the amount of bandwith you use up and hosts can charge for usage above this limit. Most hosts' allowed bandwith should be more than enough for most unsigned bands, but if you start to hit the big time, think about upgrading!     If you want to host MP3s elsewhere, then sites like MP3.com [link] and Peoplesound [link] might be what you're looking for.    Pictures and images    One good band photo is worth a hundred rubbish ones. Try not to have lots of large images on one page though, and if you're using thumbnails, don't just make it smaller in the web page's code - the download time will be just as large as if you're showing the full size version. Thumbnails should be resized in an image editor, and saved seperately as smaller versions of the large images.    Also worth thinking about is including a high resolution photo and logo for venues and press to use. These, due to their size, should not be displayed on a normal page and should be linked to seperately.     Pictures for print can afford to be large in filesize but in general a single page on a web site shouldn't be more than about 100 - 150k in size so bear this in mind when making your images. A good rule is for block colours and diagrams etc use GIF format, and for photos save as JPEG/JPG format. Both compress the images in different ways so work beter at saving space for different purposes.    Counters and guestbooks    Counters, guestbooks and message boards are hosted for free by people such as bravenet [link] and HTMLgear [link]. Remember that if you start a message board that it's unlikely you'll get a great deal of people posting unless you have an awful lot of visitors.    "Stickiness"    If a site's referred to as "sticky" it means people will keep coming back for more. This is where the extra content on your site comes in. Games, diaries, downloads etc can all encourage people to come back and see what you're up to. Bhuna's website is a good example of this [link] and on a less local scale, on the Limp Bizkit site [link], Fred Durst actually adds news to the site himself.     Keep news and other areas updated regularly, advertise those gigs and keep people coming back.    Conclusion    So here's the main things to remember:     Check the terms when signing up to any web hosting  Don't clutter the site  Keep filesizes small, especially on images  Make the text readable at different resolutions, and also the colours  Think about putting music on the site  Keep links and menus in the same place and have a recognisable home page  Be consistent    K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple and stupid) and you can't go wrong. The internet's an essential tool for bands to exploit, and it's not as daunting to get a site up as it looks. You may be surprised just how much exposure the web can give your band.         February 12, 2003 3:39pm