By Gary Marshal

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We get a lot of emails from bands who've stumbled across the site and want to know: what's the best way to put a band Web site together? There isn't really one answer - every band is different, and the same applies to Web sites - but we've put together a few pointers that apply to pretty much every site.

The basics

Not everybody can design a good site: your talents might be better-suited to writing epic rock anthems or experimental jazz fusion concept albums. If that's the case, find someone who's into this kind of stuff, give them beer and get them to do the site for you.

If you do it yourself, you can learn a lot by visiting other bands' sites and clicking View Source in your Internet browser. That's how everybody learns. Nicking people's pages wholesale is frowned upon, however, and could even get you sued.

The basics of a Web site apply to any kind of site: it should look reasonably good, it should never take more than two mouse clicks to find what you're looking for (so for bands that means linking to your gig dates from the front page), and there's no point having technology for the sake of it. You could spend a week creating a brilliant loading page in Flash format, but if it takes ten minutes to download then people will bugger off elsewhere long before it's finished.

Always think of your visitors: why should they visit your site? What will they be looking for? MP3 music? Gig dates? Links to other bands? Find out, and make those bits of your site easy to get to.

Software

It doesn't matter. This site was built using a combination of Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Photoshop, but it could have been written in Notepad and the graphics done in Paint Shop Pro, in GoLive and LiveMotion, or with a bit of paper and a biro. It's the results that matter, not the technology. So there.

Your address

If you use your ISP's Web space, you'll end up with an address like www.myisp.co.uk/users/pages/~site.htm, which is bollocks. You can register a domain ("mybandiscool.co.uk") for a fiver at http://www.123reg.co.uk, or get a http://listen.to/myband address at V3 - for free. The latter option means evil adverts, but if you're broke you probably won't care.

Consider paying for hosting: ISP Web space tends to be titchy, and there's all kinds of rules and regulations on what you can and can't do. Companies such as WebFusion will give you 400Mb of space and 3Gb of bandwidth for £200 per year, others do smaller offers for less cash. In each case, you've got total control of your space and you're unlikely to run out of room for your pages.

MP3s

Making MP3s is easy - get hold of the free MusicMatch Jukebox software and it'll do it for you. The next step is to put the files on the Web, and the best way is to have your own space (see above). MP3 sites such as Vitaminic, Peoplesound etc don't do anything to promote your music, and we'd only recommend them if you don't have enough space to host your own MP3 music. We've been running a wee experiment with some of these sites, and our downloads in the last two months have been:

Kasino web site: 13,768 downloads
Vitaminic.co.uk: 92 downloads
Peoplesound.com: no downloads

The reason for the dramatic difference is that we've promoted our own Web site, but the Vitaminic and Peoplesound downloads have been left alone. As you can see, if you just stick your MP3s up on a site and expect people to come flocking, you'll be disappointed.

Which brings us to...

Promoting your site

Put your Web address everywhere - on your flyers, on your concert tickets, on your drummer's forehead, in your emails, on the posts you make to newsgroups. Find the various Mp3 search engines and tell them about your site. Visit online fanzines and send them review copies of your songs. Find a reason for the newspapers to run stories about you, and make sure they include your site address. Link to other sites and get them to return the favour. Be aggressive - there are billions of pages on the Internet, and people won't visit yours if they don't get to hear about them. Promoting your site is absolutely essential.

One word of warning: don't flood messageboards, newsgroups or other places with "come and see my site" messages, and don't keep sending out unsolicited emails to people who don't care whether you live or die. If you do, people will call you an evil spamming bastard and they will hate you. It's also against the terms and conditions of most ISPs and hosting companies, so you could lose your Internet access and Web hosting. Not good, that.

Further reading

There are loads of magazines devoted to the Web and music, and we'd recommend the following:

.NET Magazine
MP3 Magazine
Computer Music

Coincidentally, Gary writes for all of them ;-)