I’m trying to create a cool, strong web presence for my one-man musical project. I basically wanted to make use of my already existing online content, using a minimum amount of hosting storage, but without sacrifying “style”. Or in other words, using the posibilities of social media.
If you are part of a band, it’s likely that you have music, photos, videos as well as presence in social networks. It might also be the case that you have a web page with even more content, a blog, some photo galleries and so on. But why to have duplicated content, and why spending your valuable hosting space with heavy content if you already have so wonderful services that get that job done for you?
I’m mainly using these sites:
- Soundcloud: The “Flickr for sound”. This is turning into the standard for audio sharing and showcasing, with a really cool look and excellent features such as private sharing and simple, straightforward permalinks.
- WordPress: I’m using my own WordPress installation to run my blog, but you could as well use a free wordpress.org account.
- Bandcamp: Really good and cheap for music distribution and promotion. It’s clean look is a plus!
- Reverbnation: I must say I’m not completely in love with Reverbnation, but it hosts a huge amount of features, however all of them are not free. What I like the most about it is the ability to easily setup a music and merchandising store. You can even sell your band’s T-shirts without having to print them yourself!
- Vimeo: It might not be the most popular website for video, but I love how it looks!
- Facebook: Love it or hate it, around 7% of world’s population has an active Facebook account. You have to be there as well.
- Flickr: I already mentioned music and video. It’s also a good idea to have an account in a photo-sharing website. Why not one of the most popular?
- Twitter: No other communication service is as fast, widespread and straight forward as Twitter.
The site is still under construction. Some important stuff is still missing, such as Google+ interaction and other social features, but it’s going pretty nice so far. Well, I think so. An interesting fact: the whole site is just 1.5 MB!
I know I’m leaving out some other relevant sites and services, of course, but if you want to give a try to something similar, it’s up to you which to use. I don’t want to have a website completely cluttered by social network icons. But maybe you can find a better way of doing it?
In subsequent posts, I’m planning to discuss some design choices and some API tricks.
Suggestions and comments are welcome!