Is there really any need for a proper site anymore?

Deijavoo

I kinda fell out of the gigging band game when MySpace started to go tits up (not their fault) :-) and now I'm looking at setting up everything again i really don't see any need for a dedicated band website.

Am I wrong?

Tumblr, Bandpage, Bandcamp, BigCartel, Soundcloud, Facebook and YouTube can manage my hobby I'm sure?

ICBM

I think you're right.

I doubt I'm going to renew my old band's hosting account next year. I've wound it down and there soon won't be anything I need to keep there. I'm going to hold on to the domain name but that will be it for now.

lloyd

Think it's good to have one of you get a bit of a genuine following (originals).

I'd have a dedicated site if I was in a high end function/wedding band too.

The benefit of one is that you can control the content of it and have all your links in one place.

(I don't have one btw! It's being created now-I'm in a very small originals band that's been going about a year).

Deijavoo

I had one years ago and I'd love to have a ratch through it all. Find the old forum we started (yeah, who were we kidding?)

We got some interesting posts indeed though.

One compared us to something along the lines of " "the most original and inspiring band in action today" excerpt taken from NME 500BC when only rocks and sticks could be used to create a form of primitive beat".

Fretwired

If you're a covers band looking for work then the answer is yes - the internet now supports dedicated music sites with the .band extension which will allow Google to match queries and serve relevant results to people looking for a a band for an event. Just setup a simple WordPress site.

GavRichList

Deijavoo said:

I kinda fell out of the gigging band game when MySpace started to go tits up (not their fault) :-) and now I'm looking at setting up everything again i really don't see any need for a dedicated band website.

Am I wrong?

Tumblr, Bandpage, Bandcamp, BigCartel, Soundcloud, Facebook and YouTube can manage my hobby I'm sure?

A centralised site to aggregate all the above works well. Doesnt have to be flashy, just functional.

BenSirAmos

I think a site still gives some credibility for a working band. If I was getting married and wanted a band, I'd check out several options and would probably ignore the bands that wanted me to navigate though tumblr and bandpage and whatever before I get to what I want to know. But a site does need some work to keep it looking fresh - and I must admit I can't be bothered while I'm not playing out much.  

randomhandclaps

I think you're right and I have been wondering a lot about this lately.  Curious as to what @DigitalScream thinks as I noticed the other week when checking out the album their website link redirects to Facebook. 

I am more coming around to thinking Facebook and Twitter etc. could be enough.

digitalscream

I think there's a perfectly good reason to have a website. Well, two actually.

1 - Tumblr, Bandpage, Bandcamp, BigCartel, SoundCloud, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter...that's 8 sites, which are all geared to specific types of content. How are people going to find all the bits of content you've put all over those sites? A good, clear website can act as a neat index/aggregator for stuff you put on your social media accounts, so people only have to go to one place and suddenly you've got it all right there in front of them.

2 - If somebody wants to look up, for example, info about the band members and see their photos, they have two choices - hit up Facebook and pore through all the photos you've uploaded, hoping to work out who's who from tags and oblique comments here and there. If you've got a website, they just go to the "About Us" page.

Social media is good, but it doesn't cover everything.

@randomhandclaps - that's purely a function of my available time What with all the bad luck I've had this year, as well as getting Jaden's site up and running and the many day-to-day things that go wrong as a matter of course these days, I just haven't had time to get it done.

We bought the domain and use it for emails, but the redirect to Facebook is just temporary 'cos I'm still building the site. It should be up this weekend or next.

randomhandclaps

@digitalsream - Cool, I was just curious as to whether with all your particular web knowledge you'd come to the same conclusion as Deija.

GavRichList

as my band are currently in the middle of a rebrand (!!) we're doing our site at the minute too. I'd echo @digitalscream almost word for word. As I say, it can be simple; I've a real hard on for Kauf, and his website is reeeeally simple, but does the job perfectly.

www.kaufaudio.com

PolarityMan

digitalscream said:

I think there's a perfectly good reason to have a website. Well, two actually.

1 - Tumblr, Bandpage, Bandcamp, BigCartel, SoundCloud, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter...that's 8 sites, which are all geared to specific types of content. How are people going to find all the bits of content you've put all over those sites? A good, clear website can act as a neat index/aggregator for stuff you put on your social media accounts, so people only have to go to one place and suddenly you've got it all right there in front of them.

2 - If somebody wants to look up, for example, info about the band members and see their photos, they have two choices - hit up Facebook and pore through all the photos you've uploaded, hoping to work out who's who from tags and oblique comments here and there. If you've got a website, they just go to the "About Us" page.

Social media is good, but it doesn't cover everything.

@randomhandclaps - that's purely a function of my available time What with all the bad luck I've had this year, as well as getting Jaden's site up and running and the many day-to-day things that go wrong as a matter of course these days, I just haven't had time to get it done.

We bought the domain and use it for emails, but the redirect to Facebook is just temporary 'cos I'm still building the site. It should be up this weekend or next.

We need ours so that people can follow that narrative accompanying our songs as well....I just have to upload the narrative, and finish the redesign I started 3 months ago....

digitalscream

PolarityMan said:

We need ours so that people can follow that narrative accompanying our songs as well....I just have to upload the narrative, and finish the redesign I started 3 months ago....

You know...Bandcamp has a lyric upload function - you could use that to give the narrative, too.

Having the same (or similar) content on multiple sites is actually a useful thing where possible. Getting people to jump around all over the place just frustrates them and increases the chance of a bounce.

PolarityMan

Actually while people are thinking about it any one fancy giving some feedback on the redesign.

Heres the original site:

http://www.prionson.com

And here's the mock up for the new one:

http://www.prionson.com/proof/index.html

The menu at the top is currently massively borked.

PolarityMan

digitalscream said:

PolarityMan said:

We need ours so that people can follow that narrative accompanying our songs as well....I just have to upload the narrative, and finish the redesign I started 3 months ago....

You know...Bandcamp has a lyric upload function - you could use that to give the narrative, too.

True, we have some other plans though like having character specific profiles and stuff. We were once going to automate a bunch of twitter accounts to act out the story referencing links pages on the main site and stuff like that but we're soooo very very lazy when it comes to things like that

If any one is interested would be up for collaborating on utility code for doing things like auto-tweeting news posts and stuff. I have some code that automatically builds the gallery pages from a flickr account with certain tags, might be cool to build up a library of useful stuff like that?

digitalscream

You git...that's exactly the idea I had for our third album (in terms of the story, developing the characters and giving them social media accounts to flesh out the narrative).

In terms of the new site design...I'd use the shifting background that a lot of more modern full-screen sites use, so that the background fades to another image as you scroll; you could make it specific to the entries that are in view.

PolarityMan

I think there are room for 2 bands doing that! Fancy collaborating on some tooling to make it easier?

digitalscream

It would depend entirely on when you want to do it. It wouldn't be difficult at all to tie Tweets and Facebook posts to a timeline from multiple accounts, and it could easily go in a web-based tool (where you could tie it to blog entries). I've already got the bones of something that could do it, actually, but it'd require a lot more work and it's not remotely production-ready (it was really just a test to prove a basic concept).

PolarityMan

Whenever really, perhaps having someone else to work with will prove more motivating

My initial need was to essentially schedule tweets from multiple accounts based on a db, again like you I was envisaging a web based, most likely php tool. 

I did write some code for twitter (and a numbers station to prove the concept) but it's so long ago that the auth method no longer works 

Eventually wanted to add stuff like cross post from the news section so facebook and twitter (with built in url shortening perhaps) so both get updated it the news page is updated.

In terms of pulling content the other way, ie/ displaying facebook / twitter content on the main site I figured there prob existing widgets and stuff for that.

This is prob getting a bit of a geek out for this thread though so hit me up via PM if you want to start working on something.