Building Lovetown: starting your own


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If you're a musician who has decided that you need a website, what should you do?

First, don't try to build your own Lovetown. Why? Because Lovetown is the result of 6 years of work and generating a site this large very quickly is going to require a lot of effort. In other words, it won't be cheap.

So what are the essentials? Where should you start?

I suggest a simple site encompassing 3 key things:

What does this achieve?

First, the introduction page allows you to give some background for the first group of people I mentioned when I was discussing the home page. People will ask "who are you?" and you have to answer that somewhere or your site will look like it's only for people-in-the-know. If someone has bothered to visit your site, you don't want them to feel left out. You could add some basic discography information to this page, something as simple as listing the name/s of your album/s would be sufficient.

Second, the "news" page is your way of keeping your fans in the loop. It doesn't have to be a great work of art, it simply has to be relevant, useful and most importantly, up-to-date information.

Some of your fans will be hyper-enthusiastic and will feverishly visit your "news" page at least 3 times a day. Most of your fans are comparatively lazy and won't do that. Many will be happy to receive regular updates delivered directly into their email inbox. If a fan can't be bothered to "pull" the information from your "news" page, maybe they'll prefer to have you "push" the information to them.

Beyond these three pages, there are many useful things you can put on your site. I will happily argue that all of those other things are merely icing on the cake: nice to have but not as essential as you might think. Making lyrics available to fans is nice but it's unlikely to generate any income for you: getting them along to your gigs and selling them things (eg. albums, t-shirts, etc) is likely to be more important to you.

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© 2002 David Gilliver