Our purpose is to assist musicians and club owners with the online presentation of their band
and music. We can provide or help with page design, web hosting, &
online audio aiming to market your sound & support your fan base.
As time permits we document our "advanced" use or inovation upon existing freeware & donationware scripts: The [releted pages] dropdown contains links to the sources & techniques that make our pages as they are.
We don't do business pages. Handling a Commercial Page requires different skills and a more sophisticated understanding of what traffic statistics are available through analog reports. What follows is a brief upon what we know and what we can offer.
If you are considering owning and managing a website you might want to consider it as a structure inhabited by clients you will have to face now and again. Consider your attitude to the structure you will own and operate:
Manager: The more you know about the buildings you manage, the more buildings you can manage.
Owner: The more you know about the building you manage: the more you manage the building.
Here in the "States" both of these statements prove to be true and we are not surprised that owners and managers are fond of one another: Both are to some degree owner-operators. Our Nation built itself upon the odd three legged stool of easy capital, hard labor, and the generous extention from all hands to enable the status of ownership with its character of self-reliance. But the point still remains: if your attitude is more the attitude of ownership: you should probably let a manager do the work. & The question: Do you want to or need to learn some new skills?
Marketing:
At Bluesdejour we are not focused on direct marketing of CDs. If you are intersted in direct marketing, you'll need to set up an online account with an outfit like Paypal or City Bank and a private bank account linked to your online account with them. We suggest a private account separate from your regular bank accounts in order to protect your regular accounts from the possibility of HACKS. Once your accounts are set up, you can then develope a strategy of transferring funds that minimizes the associated transfer fees.
Many musicians market their CDs through CDBaby or SoundClick. Setting up with them and finding a way to upload your song clips to their websites is all you really need to do. Having your own website linked to one of these marketing sites is a big plus. Musicians affiliated with Bluesdejour have chosen to market through CDBaby or market by direct mail.
Hosting:
Our hosting service at Bluesdejour presents an idea of how you might want to set up your own website.
Each artist or production company should have at least the equivalent of:
a Homepage
a Calendar Page
a CDs Page
a Sound Clips Page
Each of these pages should have some well thought out text aimed at honestly presenting your band(s) to both the public and to search engines like Google which help the public find your website. These pages should also include "meta tags"
which accurately reflect the content displayed upon the page."Tags" help the accuracy of search engines.
Always consider that your Website is also a Hostsite. Your site is Host to your band but also host to your marketing
affiliate, booking agency, the clubs where you perform, and other bands that you are variously connected to. At Bluesdejour we get as much traffic from clubs and affiliated bands as we do from search engines.
Join a WebRing. If you join a webring you are automatically affiliated with other artists in your genre and perhaps some online radio. Start by linking the webring to your homepage. As your website grows you may want to have the ring link to a links page but be careful because this is not the preferred strategy. A Linkspage normally doesn't contain much text so the search engines will avoid it. At Bluesdejour we link to a webring via a linkspage because we host mulitple artists and because we want to know how much traffic is actually brought by membership in the ring. The search engines can find our linkspage because it is listed at the Webring's Homepage. But it's much more likely that the visits to our linkspage will have stemmed directly from the Ring itself or from one of our fellow ring members. This knowledge helps us to measure the value of ring membership.
Join Us:
Bluesdejour can host and help design your website at vitually the same cost you will suffer by going it alone. In addition to the above mentioned features we will make sound clips from existing CD recordings of your work. These will be in the popular HiFi and LoFi MP3 streaming format, M3U, unless you want WMA or something else. And if you like, we will also add your clips to our our multi-artist SWF Player or set up an individual SWF Player to handle your clips. SWF provides Medium Fidelity playback which is a higher standard for folks with 56k modems. Be aware that WMA and SWF is easy for visitors to save and copy whereas streaming MP3 is much more difficult to save and copy.
Measuring traffic:
Knowing who is visiting your site, and which pages, song clips and audio formats they prefer is a tedious and tricky occupation. Simple "hits counters" probably overstate the number of "page views" by as little as 150%.
By downloading and installing a free utility from England called Analog 6.0 you can set up a program to yield more accurate measurements. You can easily configure the program to report daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual reports to obtain some gross results. After a little study you can use the program's "fileinclude" and "fileexclude" functions to gain some real insight into the traffic at your website. At Bluesdejour Analog 6.0 has shown us that the visitors to our site are not as numerous as we had hoped or even thought; that most of our HiFi audio is limited to an American audience; that the interest in our streaming of LoFi Mp3 and MedFi SWF is about equal; and that our experiment with SWF audio is of more interest to Europeans than to Americans. This sort of tells us what it is we need to do: Get better with HiFi = $; and figure out how to reach those other continents = purpose.
Web Design:
Every musician is an artist or at least a politician...who tacked some poster anywhere. Content: Entirely up to you! A lot of content is just "copy" so save every scrap of public notice including performance announcements and reviews, posters and cd liners. A little "copy" plus a modest bio is enough for your homepage. Hopefully you have enoght text and a few images on hand to "tack" on a webpage, size up and move around: Since "Form is an extention of Content", take a look at what you've got. Style: beyond content, style has mostly to do with shape and color. When the content itself makes no insistence, originality and novelty are hard to impose.
At Bluesdejour we figure each artist can have a unique "style" if they are willing to work with us. But without much help we can impose one of our few existing styles upon the content you supply. It might even be true that some conformity among the pages of our artists is actually a good thing.
Colors and textures:
It's best to start out with a simple choice of color for text and background. When you look around the web you may notice that white on black is a popular choice among musicians. It's a good choice. When you opt for distinctive colors the problem of color matching presents itself: different browsers show the same color differently. And any browser, but especially Internet Explorer, may show the same color differently depending upon whether the color is use as background or in foreground. Most colors are hard to match perfectly for all browsers. It's not too hard to match colors consistently for both Opera and Mozilla and settle for a slight mismatch with Internet Explorer. Or to match colors for Internet Explorer and let the mismatch happen in Opera and Mozilla....but what about all the other browsers out there...?!!
~Background textures are easy to do but make for extra time when adapting foreground images having odd shapes. Once you have adapted a few images to match the background this problem is minimal but if you decide to change the background a lot of extra time is required to redo the foreground images.
