Make a Perfect Music Band Website Design in 5 Easy Steps

The music industry is huge, with over $15bn worth of sales in 2014 alone. Over the previous twenty years, the industry has been transformed, with digital sales accounting for the same percentage as physical sales. All of this makes it more important than ever that every band has a strong, highly personalized web-presence. In the music business, online is everything.

It’s obvious that being in a band – and therefore your website – should be about music – but it’s more than that. Your band website is a way to share your media resources (sounds, pictures, video), create interactions with fans, promote your upcoming gigs and sell your produce. In 2000 Pearl Jam recorded every gig and then released them as CDs. Now, you can stream every live gig through a dedicated website. If the big guys are doing it, you can too. Your band may not be Pearl Jam, but you will want to take control of your online presence and reward loyal fans. It’s the first step to stardom, and it can be powered with music website design templates from MotoCMS.

Select Your Style

It is obvious that your band website design will need to reflect your style of music. It’s the shop window for your band. The look of your site is your business, but MotoCMS offers a range of artist website templates to suit all styles of music.

The real benefit of a MotoCMS website template for music bands is behind the scenes.

The power of a CMS system is the freedom and simplicity of creating high-quality and visually appealing pages. The drag and drop functionality of Moto CMS musician website builder enables you to build a compelling site quickly.

The benefits are pretty obvious – you can build a site packed full of functionality with no coding knowledge. The CMS also enables rapid content additions (we’ll come onto those later), meaning you can create connections with your fans as soon as the gig has ended.

Maintain these connections through a mailing list. A simple drag and drop form helps to create connections. You can then reward them with regular content, offers and listings to keep them returning to your site.

In addition, you can easily swap pages, helping you keep it functioning and performing for you by using the various page template options. Share new music, update news or include details of an upcoming tour in minutes.

In promoting their European tour, Maroon 5 have changed the whole look of their site, bringing their tour dates to the front of the site.

Organize Media Library

Content is certainly king in the digital world, and nowhere is this more important than for bands.

Systems like WordPress can often make uploading media content a chore, with the need to enter the source code of individual pages to get your video just right. It’s often fiddly and, when it goes wrong, can be embarrassing.

Loading videos and pictures is simple and pain-free with the media library in MotoCMS composer website builder. The easy to use back-end system enables you to create galleries and pages packed full of a variety of media, dragging and dropping it into your page designs.

Band Website Theme with Moto CMS Control Panel

Your images are also simple to manage with the built-in editor on the Moto CMS site enabling you to chop, change and edit your pictures. You can also add effects – perfect for refreshing those dark gig images.

Build Social Media Presence

Social media is a perfect way to share your music with the world. It also enables you to speak directly to fans.

A singer and songwriter John Mayer is such a fan of social media, that his most recent tweets form the homepage to his website.

Once you’ve got your band name, the first thing to do is to secure as many assets as you can. Facebook, Twitter and others are all essential means for communicating with your fans.
But social media goes beyond that. It creates interactions you can’t control, linking fans across the world. Social media offers ‘social proof’ to fans, and enables them to interact and discuss your music.

Traditionally fans had forums for this sort of interaction, but now conversations can be started and monitored with a hashtag.

Moto CMS sites make it easy to link your social media profiles. They are all optimized to allow you to share your content. Learn some hints and tips on the best way to do that.

Create Connections

US industry specialists estimate that it takes $1 million to promote and launch a new band. That may be true, but the web is making things much easier for bands to go ahead.

It’s true that bands make more money from their merchandising than their ticket sales. Don’t miss out on this essential revenue stream with a poor merchant solution. There are many ways to monetize your content, selling physical copies of your releases, band merchandise and even tickets directly to gig-goers.

Media galleries and an in-built merchant solution allow you to create a storefront for your band and it’s up to you what you sell. The increasing protection offered by Paypal is just one of the reasons it’s becoming the de-facto online standard for payments. Your customers will be reassured that your shop comes with this extra level of protection. It’s also much simpler for the merchant, too.

The Coldplay store is a basic layout, with both horizontal and vertical navigation tabs. It’s highly unlikely your band will need its own separate merchant site just yet, but sell enough records and T-Shirts and you just might.

Keep a Track on Progress

You will want to know who is visiting your website, and how it’s performing which is why analytics are essential. There are some great resources online to help you understand how users navigate through your site, including some help in identifying key analytics. It’s more than just the number of visitors – it’s where they’re from, how they’re using your site, your most popular media files and what they’re looking at in your store.

Analytics can help you broaden your appeal. If you find you’ve got fans visiting from across the world, the new language functionality in Moto CMS can provide an accurate translation of your site at the touch of a button. It currently only works for 21 languages, but is being improved as we speak.

This website template is a great example of a solid and simple band website design that provides clear access to information. It’s also built around a simple columnar layout which, using the Moto CMS editor, can be changed and improved simply. Analytics will help you analyse how visitors use your site, enabling you to get the best layout for you and your band.

Being in a band is a lot of fun, but it’s also a lot of work. Once you start as a band it’s the best way to get gigs and share your music. When you become bigger, it’s a way of maintaining contact with your audience and a serious source of revenue that can, in time, become as important as selling records.

A CMS can take the hassle out of your site, and prove to be one of your most valuable assets. Initial builds are cheap and trouble free, content is easy to share and your merchant solution is taken care of, leaving you to concentrate on the most important thing: sharing your music.