July 13, 2005
Advice to Bands
Posted by Larry Karnowski at July 13, 2005 10:35 PMIf you're a new band, trying to promote yourselves, a website is about the best thing you can do. Put pictures of yourselves and mp3 samples of your songs. These are great ideas.
However, please do not put a hit counter image on your site. I've seen way too many of these the past few days. They are very passe and make your site look amateurish and dated.
Tracking hits to your website is very important information, but there are far better, more sophisticated, and more subtle ways of doing this. Pick an ISP that gives you raw access to your access logs, or better yet, choose an ISP that gives you both raw access and a sophisticated analysis tool like AWStats or similar. These are very standard options, and any ISP worth their $5-10/month will go out of their way to put this information in your hands.
Sorry, just had to get that out of my system!
Also, please proofread! This goes for all bands, even the bigger ones. Lost Highway's Lucinda Williams site boasted for many, many months of her writing a "forward" to a book. Well, yay, except it's FOREWORD (they've since corrected it, though it's still capitalized for no apparent reason).
While we're on the subject, Lost Highway could really stand to hire some proofreaders (ME! ME! ME ME ME!) -- as Sean pointed out to me, their liner notes are atrocious. I'll leave that rant about that -- watch this space!
Posted by: Stacy at July 13, 2005 11:02 PMIt's the little things that make the overall presentation more professional....
Posted by: frank at July 14, 2005 11:37 PM
