Get Web Savvy
The net's like a firing range - you can shoot yourself in the foot, or hit the target and shoot to international prominence. Here Mark Wrafter from onemorego.com speaks of the software required to make those all-important site updates.
For any Irish band hoping to run an effective website there are two elements you must concern yourself with. Building it, and maintaining it.
Many bands decide to bring in outside assistance to create a web presence to capture the imagination of record executives, fans and media alike, yet many will choose, for financial reasons or because in-band skills exist, to create the website themselves. The savvy band will use industry-standard software to create this web presence, for the result of using unsuitable or poor software, even with skill, can result in poor output.
To create a site, onemorego recommends that you commence your design by using Adobe Photoshop. Start off with a window of some 760 pixels wide to ensure that you are catering for the vast majority of screen resolutions, then incorporate all the vital elements that you would like to see on your homepage. We're talking things like, band photograph, navigation, introductory text, mailing list invitation and the all important logo. We suggest that you create your logo, if you're creating it from scratch, in Adobe Illustrator for a cleaner output. Doing so will enable you to use this media, in enlarged sizes at a later date on other media, such as flyers, posters, CD covers and so on.
Ensure you use Adobe Photoshop's "Save For Web" feature to create file sizes suitable for web-usage. Typically this means you'll be outputting in either JPG or GIF. Having created your images, navigation and logos we suggest you use Macromedia Dreamweaver to create your site. We dislike such applications as Microsoft Frontpage as it infuses redundant code into your work, which makes your file size, and thus your users download sizes, larger than they need be. Homesite and EditPlus 2 are nice applications for dealing with raw code if you're that way inclined, but users tend to like Dreamweaver's dual code and graphical approach.
The Dreamweaver application is also the industry standard for updating content on your website. However, for those who have had a site created for them, or are updating a site not of their creation, the reasonably-new-to-market Macromedia Contribute is an option - it might be a particularly good option for a site maintainer whose skills don't go much beyond that of using Microsoft Word, for the interface in terms of bolding, italicising, underlining, typing and so on are much the same.
Both Macromedia Contribute and Dreamweaver contain FTP (file transfer protocol) facilities for getting your files up onto your site, and again for those who are non-technical in nature, this is useful. For those who like a more hands-on and dirty approach then CuteFTP is an excellent application, quick, user-friendly and providing all the functionality one might require.
We also recommend that when you both create and maintain your website that you test in the most common browsers, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. Don't forget Safari, Internet Explorer and Firefox for the Apple Mac too - things can often look a tad odd in the Mac when you don't expect it to be the case.
As always a little practice goes a long way, and if proud of your band, we're confident you'll invest the time required to run a professional and impressive website.
Mark Wrafter is an agent at onemorego.com, web design for the music industry.
