The Biggest Website Mistakes You're Making - Pt. 1

[jeremiahjacobs]

Really innovative way of using YouTube as a consulting medium....good video. I'd resisted watching for weeks, but after a few minutes, have really come to like your comfortable, genuine, call-it-as-I-see-it approach.

Nicely done.

[MusiciansMastermind]

Thanks Jeremiah! Nice to meetcha - I'm in Northern CA too!

[bricktop11]

im a webdesigner and i get loads of people wanting flash based sites i decline to make them for the same reason you have said i want my clients to get the most visitors so i do basic

[MusiciansMastermind]

Thanks bricktop! I'm glad even a design pro "gets" what I'm saying. Design is wonderful, but design for the sake of design isn't necessarily the best when one is trying to showcase something other then the design...

[MusiciansMastermind]

Yes, I do know the artists syndrome well... Although it makes me wonder, if one wants to be anti-capitalists, anti-business, anti-selling, why one would watch this video in the first place! I think that's a great idea - tackling this idea head on in future videos. Glad you enjoyed it!

[herrinband]

Michelle, thank you. I just bought your YouTube guide and look forward to implementing as much of it as possible. You are encountering what I call the artists syndrome here. The apparent battle between the artist and the marketing. They are more worried about the colors than the communication. Perhaps it is something worth tacking head on in one of your future vids. Although it does leave more room for those that do get it.. ha ha. :-) keep em comin!

[TeamGopher]

What do you feel are the most important methods of buzz building for a band? How would you rank them in a scale of importance?

[MusiciansMastermind]

MySpace and YouTube are sites you've got to be a part of. Other then that, it depends on the genre of music. The biggest thing you want to do, other then make great music, it make it really really easy for a fan to tell their friends about you. That kind of word of mouth is where buss is really built. I'll talk about some methods to encourage this in a future video.

[cutlace]

This is not an example of a bad website. "Don't show them pretty swirley things .... just play the music"... have you ever heard of the value of presentation, are you sure you're a web designer and not some biased SEO geek?

[MusiciansMastermind]

Since you only watched 4.5 minutes of a 20 minte presentation, I'll let this go. But I went on to talk about tons of things this website is doing right - in fact, I chose it because it had a solid foundation, and the improvements I suggest are easily implemented. And I never said I was a web designer, I'm a marketing expert.

[cutlace]

Also, consumers tend to know their industry quite well. And keeping the site simple as perfectly valid. Filling the homepage with sales information, email disclaimers, music players... not cool. Content rich sites are more appropriate for publicly listed sites. Splash pages are fine if you know how to use them. I did not disaggree with all of this tutorial but I did find it extremely opinionated. Grimey city isn't amazing but only a few adjustments need to be made.

[MusiciansMastermind]

Opinions are like assholes, right? :-)

[cutlace]

As for making Grimey City more of a sales front, musicians and their fans do not want to be SOLD anything. They want to be impressed, if they are impressed enough to want to make a purchase, a simple link to a shop area will suffice, they do not want to know, especially on the home page, that the site is all about some salesman pushing a product.

[MusiciansMastermind]

Perhaps they don't WANT to be sold, but they it should be very easy to find the way to buy. My point here, and in the rest of the vids, was to make is easy for visitors to find what they want - sample tracks, purchase info, etc.

[cutlace]

sorry i tuned off 4.5 minutes into this. don't like it. flash sites can be successfull in search engines (try typing in DAIM into google). Musicians and music "consumers", particularly those into Breaks, Techno and Dubs, usually like flash sites because the have been impressed. Flash, as it's name describes, is flashier than html/css pages. Particularly in the music business, Flash is more appropriate.

[MusiciansMastermind]

You've rasied some excellent points! I think Flash has a place, but not on the first page of a website. Some people have slower connections, some people just don't want to wait for it to load, etc. You can impress people with plain HTML right up front, then lead them through your site, your music, your flash, etc.

[Niosiss]

Yeah bro, you really took everything she said TOTALLY the wrong way. You posted an ART SITE to counter what she said about MUSIC sites???? She NEVER said flash as a whole was bad, just flash intros (which 90% of people skip, and the other 10% likely couldn't figure out how to do so). You turned it off because you "disagreed" with what she said when in reality you only heard what you wanted to.

[spdfusiontv]

really good info Michelle, I learned something and I'm not even a in the music biz...!

[freeegypt]

nice video.....thnx for sharing...keep it up...:)