Create your artist website with Wordpress
October 17th, 2007 by Nico Ramon
I’ve been talking about blogging your music in the past and now I am even more convinced that it is an essential fan interaction method for any artist. I have been thinking many times about the idea of building your official artist website based on blogging software such as Wordpress and I was very positively surprised as I stumbled on a live example of that idea. A finnish band called Jermaine has succesfully utilized the idea of using a blog as an interaction and information tool between the artist and the audience, without compromising over design or functionality.
Wordpress is the blogging software and has been widely adopted among the most popular blogs in the world. It is free, fairly simple to use and install, and highly customizable. The most interesting aspects of Wordpress are Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and the massive amount of useful plugins. RSS feeds are a great way for your fans to stay “remotely” in touch with the latest happenings on your website and to filter out the most interesting news.
Wordpress offers automatically a number of different RSS feeds when you create a new blog, but I recommend cheking out FeedBurner’s services also since they offer many useful RSS feed promotion tools. Below is an example of FeedBurner’s Headline Animator that shows my latest blog posts. It is very customizable and you could easily make one that displays your upcoming concerts or public appearances, and then try to get your fans to put it on their own blogs/websites/social network profiles.
The great thing about Wordpress is the community, which is actively developing and improving numerous useful plugins. Although there are no specially designed plugins for musicians, you can still make good use of many of the plugins. Mashable has compiled a great article of over 50 different Wordpress plugins for multimedia purposes, and I bet you can implement at least some of them in your artists blog/website.
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I strongly agree that bands need to use the power of blogs. However to have a blog as their primary site is too little. Artists should have a primary site at least 1 social networking profile and use the power of a blog. Wordpress is the blogging tool of choice for bloggers except of course me but I am well me.
Netvalar said this on October 17th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Netvalar, I agree that artists should use online social networks as much as possible, but in my opinion it is also a great idea to combine your blog and normal website under one roof. Actually I don’t see any reason to keep them separated.
Nico Ramon said this on October 17th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
I agree that your blog should if nothing else be embedded into your website. it is best if your blog actually fits within the branding style of your site. Your social profile is merely as a hub outside of your site and hopefully interacts together. Too many bands/artists don’t get thier own web-site and try to use either a social profile or blog or something similar as a primary focus.
Netvalar said this on October 25th, 2007 at 7:18 pm