Tips For Designing A Good Band Website

Summary: Tips for designing the best band website possible.

If you follow these tips and guidelines below, you will have a great band website that will make you look professional, engage fans, and blow away your competition.

1. Get a memorable url: You want your websites url to be memorable. The best url’s are those where you can just have your band name followed by a .com. Unfortunately though, many .com domain names have been taken. If this is the case consider a .net, or come up with a url that is a phrase that contains your band name followed by a .com. ie. If your band was named The Beatles, you could use the url thebeatlesrock.com.

2. Connect Your Social Networks To Your Band’s Website: Make sure that all of your social networking pages (Facebook, MySpace, Reverbnation, Twitter, etc.) are linked to your bands page. This makes it much easier for your fans to connect with you on the social network of their choice.

3. Provide Links Stores Where Your Music Is For Sale: Make it as easy as possible for your fans to purchase your music. Make sure that you provide links to your music on iTunes, Amazon, etc. If you want to go one step further, consider signing up for an affiliate program with the stores that your music is found in. Becoming an affiliate will allow you to make additional money on your sales because the stores will share a portion of the revenue that they make above what you normally would get. Another nice feature is that if your fans purchase any other music while they are on a site like iTunes, you will get a percentage of that as well.

4. Provide Detailed Contact Information: I can’t even begin to tell you how many band websites I come across where the band forgets to provide contact info. Make sure that, at minimum, you include an email address and phone number.

5. Provide A Street Team Resources Section: If you are serious about your band, you need to have a street team. Make their job as easy as possible by providing marketing materials such as flyers and posters that they can download from your website, print off and distribute. You may also want to consider providing banner ads that your street team and fans can post on their own websites and social networking pages. Another good promotional tool is screensavers and desktop backgrounds.

6. Have A Bio Section: Fans want to get to know you. Make sure you provide a band and band members bio along with plenty of pictures.

7. Audio/Video Links: If you have free music or videos to share, make sure that you either embed them on your website, or at minimum, provide links to where they can be found.

8. Collect Email Addresses: If you have a band newsletter, make it easy for fans to sign up for it. Newsletter companies like Constant Contact and Campaigner provide a free newsletter sign up tool that you can imbed on your website.

9. Make Your Website Aesthetically Pleasing: Make sure your website looks great! If you are going to take the time to make a website, make sure that it looks professional. A cheap, ugly website will actually do more to hurt your image than to help it. If you have a bad website, you are better just having no website at all.

10. Make Your Website Easy To Use: Please make your website easy to use. Make sure that all features are clearly presented to the viewer. Keep things simple.

11. Sell Your Merch: A website is a perfect place to allow fans that are unable to attend your shows to buy your merchandise. Post pictures of Tshirts, CDs, stickers, patches, etc that you sell. Use paypal to accept credit cards.

Written by: Brenden Bosmans

Brenden is a Marketing Consultant to Distrophonix LLC. Distrophonix provides digital distribution (iTunes & 400+ other stores), CD Pressing, Download Cards, Mastering, etc. to Record Labels, Musicians and Studios. To learn more about Distrophonix check out:
http://www.distrophonix.com/