Make A Band Website

 

By Vicky Phipps, a graduate of The Ohio State University.

You can also use it in writing copy and creating graphics for your own, standalone web site. Your social networking pages will be essential for interaction, but you need your own URL and a main placeholder site, at least, to redirect people back to that.

Of course, on that main page, you'll provide links to everywhere else you are on the web. But you want to make this an attractive destination in itself, don't you? A cheesy, pre-designed template from your web hosting company can make you look unprofessional, so if you've got some decent visual sense, you might want to try to design your own page. The Principles of Web Design, by Jason Beaird, is written in a way that even non-designers can understand, and will stop you from creating a visual eyesore. For the technical stuff, try Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web Graphics. Author Jennifer Niederst Robbins basically holds your hand during the baby steps of learning the nitty-gritty of coding.

After you've gotten the hang of things, you may want to get more ambitious about driving traffic to your site (and thus, gaining more fans). Ready to dive in deeper? Try learning the principles of web marketing. Remember, your music is your art, but if you are trying to make it, it's also your business! Harder-nosed business thinking never hurt.

The ÉFor Dummies series is always a good launching point. Web Marketing For Dummies lays it all out in simple terms, from explaining how to write an effective newsletter to getting fancy with podcasts and video blogs. Remember, you'll also want to know what out of all this works best, so the section on interpreting web analytics -figuring out how exactly people got to your site -should be read and re-read.