Musicians' Websites
Is your website helping you or is it actually doing you harm?
3. Why people visit your website
First, let's get the most important thing out of the way - why people visit your website.
You know what are the top 3 things people are looking for when they visit websites?
- Information
- Information
- Information
And they want to be able to find that information as quickly and easily as possible!
If they only want to look at pretty pictures on a screen, they'll watch television.
If they only want adverts telling them how great something is, they'll watch television or buy a magazine.
Ask yourself this - why do you visit websites? Why did you come to this one?
Presuming that you have better things to do than sit idly clicking random links to see where they might take you and what pretty pictures might come up, if you are like 99.99% of other users then you go to a website to find information.
That information might be in the form of text, photographs, audio or video - but it is what people are looking for.
The information offered is the sole purpose of a website; everything else is eye-candy, hype, adverts or someone trying to get you to give them your money.
Sure, a certain amount of eye-candy enhances the content, but if there's nothing but eye-candy, or if the eye-candy makes it harder to get the information, then your website is an expensive redundant waste of bandwidth and all it's doing is pissing people off. And the real joke is, they're not going to go to the bother of telling you they're pissed off - they're just going to go somewhere else!
The Internet has speeded up the communication of information. Websites which slow it down again by placing more importance on the eye-candy than on the content belong with the dinosaurs.
One of the commonest "dummy-type" mistakes made by novices in building websites is to presume that every visitor arrives at your site already knowing who you are and what you do.
Here's a fact which harsh experience has etched onto the brains of every serious web developer. Someone who knows nothing about you might have followed a link from somewhere else. If they then arrive at the home page of your site and they don't immediately see something which tells them who you are, what the site is all about and what to do next, hey presto, they've just hit their Back button and you've lost them.
That's not an opinion, it's a fact confirmed by every piece of serious web usability research.
The rule of thumb on the web is that from the moment someone clicks on a link to your website, you have about 10 seconds to grab their attention to prevent them going somewhere else. And what they need to do to proceed further around the site should be immediately self-evident without any hunting around.
You know that really impressive front page which has nothing but a photo of you and your name in really cool lettering with a button saying something like "enter" or "click here"? Apart from the fact that several thousand other musicians also have an identical front page (built using the same DIY template), you know all it's doing? Driving away people who don't already know all about you.
Regarding websites, usability expert Jakob Neilsen has a saying which is well worth understanding and remembering - "Most users spend most of their time on other peoples' websites".
Consider this - there are literally several billions of pages on the WWW. What makes you think yours is so special that people are going to meekly hang around and waste their time waiting for it to load or trying to figure out how to use it if the links are hard to find? Welcome to Planet Earth. If someone visits your website, regardless of what setup they're using, something readable, meaningful, informative, interesting and useful should appear on their screen within 10 seconds. If it doesn't, you've either lost them or pissed them off. Fact.
So, a website for a professional musician should contain the following information and it - or very clear obvious unambiguous links to it - should be available almost instantly, on the front page if at all possible, without them having to download plugins, wait for fancy splash screens to load, or hunt around to find where the links are:
* Who you are * What you do * What you look like * Where you're playing
In addition, you can add extra user value to your site by adding mp3 samples, video clips, lyrics of songs, notation for tunes, more detailed discographies, fuller biographies, bigger picture galleries, interesting graphics, interactive discussion forums, guestbooks, blogs etc.
But if you want them to take you seriously and spend the time to find out what you have to offer, don't make it difficult for them!