Making your Online Debut
Friday, September 12th, 2008
The entertainment gig isn’t all glam and glory. There’s a lot of elbow grease and self-promotion that goes into reaching stardom. That’s why, more than ever, artists are publishing their stories online. There are various ways to accomplish this, but what’s the best route for you?
There are plenty of free services out there to give yourself a web presence. Blogspot, MySpace, and Facebook can all give you a presence online. However, when you really want to stand out, you need your own URL. This may seem daunting to people who have not built their own site before, but it’s really not as bad as it may sound.
What you need.
Basically, there are 3 key components to putting together your first site. You’ll need to start with some good cheap web hosting. This is the computer somewhere that will actually hold the files people access when they go to your site.
Secondly, get a good domain. Obviously, if you’re marketing a band, you’d like to get ‘yourbandname.com’ as .com is the most popular web extension. There are various options out there for domain registration and it’ll cost you about $10/year.
Finally, your content base. I’d recommend looking for an open source web platform. If you want a more blog-looking approach, you have to go with Wordpress. More complicated sites merit looking into Drupal or Joomla (but be warned, these are more advanced).
There you go. If you really have an idea of what you want your site to look like, you can have it up and running in less than a day. Obviously, though – you gotta represent yourself well, so put some time into it and make it something really worth visiting and that brands you or your band well.