Musicians' Websites
Is your website helping you or is it actually doing you harm?
2. Websites for Musicians
Be absolutely clear about one thing. These days, your website is no longer just a cute promotional option, a bit like taking out an ad in a magazine - it is a major avenue of communication between you and your audience and their relationship with you will be strongly influenced by it. If you make visiting your site a frustrating and irritating experience, they will not thank you for it.
If someone came up to you at a gig and asked you where they could buy your CD, would you ignore them? Would you snarl at them and tell them to piss off?
How do you know your website isn't doing exactly that? Have you ever tried looking at it on an entirely different setup from the one you normally use? You think a website is like television where everybody sees exactly the same thing?
OK, tell me this - what computer am I using and what are my default settings? What browser am I using? How do you know? Have I got Javascript enabled? Flash? Am I actually looking at your site sitting at home using a computer or using a mobile while sitting in Watford Gap services? How do you know?
You don't.
It is a terribly sad fact of life but there are now more cowboys working in building commercial websites than in the construction industry. The reason they get away with it is because most people really haven't much of a clue about what the World Wide Web actually is or how it works.
If houses were built to the same standard that a huge number of commercial websites are built to, the courts would be swamped trying to handle the lawsuits.
Sure, many of these sites look pretty - but so does wallpaper.
Would you buy a house because it had pretty wallpaper without caring whether the walls behind were crumbling?
There is a huge number of detailed and carefully conducted research studies available as to how and why people use the web and what they use it for - not how you think they use it, not how you think they should use it, not even how you'd like them to use it, but how they already actually DO use it - and what they actually use it for.
Here's a startling result from all that research and studies. Prepare yourself for a shock.
Most people don't really care WHAT your site looks like so long as it's clear and easy to use and doesn't make life difficult for them.
If you have difficulty believing that then your site was built according to how you think people should use websites, not how they already do.
In reality, the World Wide Web is the ultimate in instant gratification. By having a website, you're making an implicit promise to the visitor that you have something they will find useful or informative.
The WWW is a real democracy, a new type of democracy. If people trust your promise and come to your website, they want the information you promised them, and they want it right now and if you don't give it to them immediately without hassle and faffing around or you make them jump through a load of hoops, they'll just vote with their fingers and go somewhere else.
Your visitors don't care how great your web skills are. They don't care about how clever your graphics ability is. They don't care that you can write magnificently inventive scripts. They don't care how brilliantly creative you are with Flash.
They care only about one thing - getting what they came to your site to find and getting it with the absolute minimum of effort. And the job of your website is to deliver on your promise that that's what you'll give them.
So here are a few things for musicians to consider. Knowledge is power - acquire it and use it.
3. Why people visit your website