There is no shortage of musician websites. Myspace, iLike, Reverbnation, iSound, and even facebook fan pages. They all can bring traffic to your music and serve their purpose. But the most important website is your own. A website with your own domain name (like www.your-name-or-band.com) as a central place for content, news and sales is the most important website to invest in for your music.The biggest reason for this is consistency. If you are building a career, all the fad websites of the day will come and go. Sure, maybe your myspace.com/jasonpauljohnston address last year was the biggest thing, but don't put it as the only site on your CD cover or press release. You need real ownership. What happens if Myspace starts charging you or it gets sold to an evil force up to no good? You are just renting space for free from all these other sites and anything could happen overnight. In 10 years time you should still be selling your CD, but myspace may not even exist then.
After you obtain your own domain name (I use 10dollar.ca for .ca's and musicincanada.com for dot.com's) there are three basic approaches to doing your own website. Build/program yourself, hire a programmer, use an existing online service.
For the true DIY musician, a program yourself website might be the ticket as long as the website stays relatively simple. You can learn HTML fairly easily with all the online resources available and that is the kind of website you would use for posting some information, music and pictures. Paypal buttons can be used for sales but that is about the extent of it. If you want to have a dynamic website using any kind of database or interactivity you will need to learn PHP or another type of language. I would suggest you stick to doing music!
Some musician websites are based off of pre-made blog type websites. The advantage is you can update your news very easily and don't have to learn programming. They are harder to tweak in terms of design and difficult with some functionality like selling music downloads. For free blogging websites check out www.blogger.com or the slicker www.wordpress.org. For a paid blogging site typepad.com seems to be the site of choice, but I don't think it's worth the money in comparison. There are tons of free and paid templates and plug-ins for these blog sites that can make them look and act a little more rock n' roll.
If you hire a programmer to do your website make sure they have good design sense. Check out some other sites they have done and see if it matches your image and look. Expect to pay over $1000 for even a simple website with a few features. Many professional musician websites cost tens of thousands more plus maintenance fees. If you pay a programmer/designer I would suggest you make it a design you can update yourself so you can add reviews, concert dates and new songs as you desire. You don't want your website just full of old news. People might come back a second time, but probably not a third time.
Although I can do some programming myself, I decided to go with the online service called Bandzoogle for my website for a number of reasons. The main one is I didn't have the time to program my own site. I literally set up my basic site in minutes. I wanted to keep my focus on the music. Bandzoogle also had just enough design flexibility. It included a number of hard to find features like "pay what you can pricing" on downloads and Google maps showing where people live who are surfing your site. (Not the exact addresses of course!) It was also very dynamic and allowed me to update my site from any computer with an internet connection. You can check out my site here: www.jasonpauljohnston.com and see what you think. Click here or the banner ad below to try Bandzoogle for yourself.
In the end, check out some sites, make a list of the features and look you need, figure out what time and resources you have available and make your decision. But I encourage you to make your own website the central place for purchasing your music and finding out the latest news. Anything is better than nothing, just don't get lost in the web on your way to making and recording your songs!
