Filed under: Marketing & Promotion
I have been using programs like Dreamweaver and Frontpage to design websites for music and studio projects for years. At first, it was bad. Really bad. Trying to organize biographies, images, event calendars, music streams into a nice layout from scratch took days, if not weeks. Sometimes you had to sacrifice design for functionality or vise versa. Once the site was built, I still needed to routinely pull down old events and add new music and images. After a year, the content grew larger than the design would allow for and the layout needed to be updated. Back to square one. Before long, I was spending more time updating the site than I was working on music.
Yes, I could have hired someone to maintain my site. But what happens when they lose interest? How long before they actually got around to posting the new content I sent over? Sure, there are companies that provide templates and tools, but I didn’t want my site looking like 200 other bands out there.
Enter WordPress, a platform used by the blogging community.
When it comes to publishing online content at the click of the mouse, the blogging community has it down. With more than 12 million Americans currently maintaining blogs, new online publishing tools designed to support their endeavors have emerged to help content creators focus on the core of their sites – the content. While there are various sites that will help you build a blog property, WordPress offers tools and plug-ins that allows you to customize your site to fit your readers. It’s these plug-ins that make WordPress a beautiful online content management tool for artists and musicians.
So, what does blogging have to do with bands?
A blog, short for web log, is a website where entries are posted in reverse chronological order, allowing for the newest posts to take center stage on a site. For musicians, a blog is a great way to post your news, thoughts, and events along a time line. 
Have you seen this icon lately? Otherwise known as the RSS feed (RSS stands for really simply syndication), this button allows readers to subscribe to your blog in their web browsers or feed aggregation service of choice. Instead of having readers check your site every day to see if new content is available, they can subscribe to your feed. When you post new content, your subscribers will be alerted. You can also ask event listing services and members of the press to subscribe to your feed, eliminating the need to send out mailing list emails that, more often than not, end up in junk mail folders.
Now that your content has a feed, broadcast it to the world.
WordPress allows you write both posts and pages. Posts are entries that get added to your feed. You would create categories such as “news” and “events” to hold these types of articles. For your biography, images, and contact information, you can place this information in a “page” and keep it out of the feed all together.
Once your content is available through a feed, you can use the feed URL to create widgets that will let you to embed your content on other sites.
Here is an example of an artist group that is using WordPress and has placed a widget on their MySpace page to pull up their feed content:
Sangre del Sol
Website | Feed URL | MySpace (see yellow widget)
When the Sangre del Sol site is updated, their MySpace page is automatically updated as well. There is no need to put the information up in two places. They let the feed do all the work for them.
There is a plug-in for everyone!
Now that you have given your content legs, lets take a look at some of the tools that can help give your site some functionality. After installing the basic WordPress blog on your server, there are hundreds of plug-ins you can install to make common updates more efficient. Here are a few of my favorites:
Podpress: Allows you to quickly create podcasts from your music streams and promote your music through podcast distributors like iTunes and Podcast Pickle.
NextGen Gallery: Allows you to upload images to a gallery and automatically create thumbnails for quick display on your “images” page.
Gigs Calendar: Allows you to add gig information and automatically adds event to a calendar this is displayed on your site’s home page.
Flickr Tag: Insert Flickr sets, tags or individual photos in your posts by using a special tag.
EasyTube: Allows WordPress users to easily embed YouTube and Google Videos using one simple tag.
Feedburner (not a plug-in, but a service): Provides tools that allow you to put an email sign-up on your site so users can elect to receive your feed via email. When you post a new page, that page is automatically emailed to your subscribers. No more mailing list emails. Brilliant! In additional to mailing list feeds, Feedburner also provides tools for monitoring your traffic and statistics.
Want more?
Want to learn more about installing WordPress? Check out this article, written by Tim Ziegler, about how to install, manipulate, and use WordPress. Want to learn more about blogging. Visit www.BurstBlog.com.
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