Musicians' Websites
Is your website helping you or is it actually doing you harm?
4. Is Your Site Here?
Imagine for a minute you're trying to book a flight to your next gig.
You're on a slow dialup modem connection as you're using a laptop in a hotel room in Little Piddling under Trent and the hotel doesn't have broadband for guests yet so you're paying the exorbitant phone rates charged by hotels. By the minute.
You go to the website of Muzowtours travel agency and wait for ages while the page loads. The screen then says "You need the fliggy-jump plugin to view this page - click here to download it" so you click there and the plugin begins to download.
Being on a slow dialup, it takes a while, so you go and make a cup of tea and get back before it's finished.
Once the plugin's in place, the rest of the page downloads and you see it is a quite classy-looking, mildly-amusing animation which tells you that you are at the website of Muzowtours and to click on the picture to proceed.
You click on the picture and after what seems like another interminable wait, another large slickly-produced animated picture appears. The screen says, "Muzowtours - travel facilities for the professional musician. Click anywhere to proceed."
So you click and have another long wait before the next page loads. This page is an intricate series of flashing boxes with quotes from customers saying how wonderful Muzowtours is, and you scan the page for some clue as to what to do next, grinding your teeth at the thought of what this is all costing you.
After giving yourself a migraine studying the screen in minute detail you finally spot a link, in dark red text on a slightly darker red background, telling you to "click here".
You click there and finally another page loads which is a list of options and, by now at screaming point, you start hunting for an option to book your flight.
If you have half a brain cell working, you've taken your business somewhere else long before you ever get to the options page.
Me? I've gone as soon as I see the first message telling me I need the plugin.
And so have 90% of all other regular web users.
Now, go and find someone with a computer setup which you've never used before. Perhaps a Mac with a speech browser or a PC running Linux operating system and a browser with Javascript, frames and Flash all switched off.
Now go to your own website, if you have one, and try to get information about where you're playing next month.
If that information is not immediately accessible no more than one click from the first page that loads and with a minimum of hunting around for a link, and/or you encounter a scenario anything even remotely like any of the things in the fictional one I described above, your website is terminally broken and is costing you visitors.
5. How To Piss Off Your Audience