Tips for your brass band website

Here are a few tips for the budding webmaster creating a brass band website. This page doesn't aim to tell you how to write a site from scratch, there are plenty of books around on that subject. It assumes that you're already accomplished and about to publish or revamp your site and need a few final ideas. Furthermore, as web site writing is a matter of opinion you could well disagree with some of these, but they should give you food for thought.

It's disappointing to see the number of sites with impressive flash introductions that must have taken a lot of time and effort to produce on sites that don't even tell the visitor when and where the band rehearses!

You may also wish to look at Gavin Holman's tips for some other ideas.

Ensure that you mention how to contact the band, both by e-mail and by telephone
Mention the full name of the contact person
Talk about the aims and objectives of the band
What music do you work with
Don't try to do what other people have already done
Research states that web site visitors will not wait more than 15 seconds for a page to download, they get bored after just 10 seconds, so optimise (compress) your graphics
Don't have large graphics on the main page
Test the page with at least two browsers (say IE and Firefox)
Test the page with at least two operating systems (say Windows and Linux or Mac)
Link to other pages
If someone links to you, good manners dictates that you should link back to them
Advertise on mainstream web search engines, and on The Brass Band Portal
Display the brass band group logo
Join the Cycle of Fifths and Brass Band Webrings
Use your web address on your official band letter headed note paper and concert programmes
If you use a commercial service ensure that you only use a service that has set up a site for a brass band before such as NJH Music
Remember it's the message that counts not how you say it - don't get carried away with boring glitz, Flash, Java, JavaScript, or silly words such as "cool" or "check out"
Visit as many other brass band sites as you can before you even start to design yours. Decide what's good and what's bad
Design your site on paper before going to the computer
Access the site from another ISP to verify the speed and check that it works
Remember that a page reflects the band. Over use of colours, backgrounds and animation looks cheap and amateurish, that makes the band looks cheap and amateurish. A professional looking page makes the visitor think that you're professional
The eye is distracted by movement. If you add too much animation on your page the eye will move away from the important information - telling people about your band
Above all, remember that the site exists to sell your band - not to show that you can use the latest web generating toys
Search engines often don't work with redirector pages, so don't use sites such as http://welcome.to and http://www.bigfoot.com since they also slow down the visitor you're less likely to keep someone anyway (see above)
People who are colour blind often have difficulty with red on black or black on red
Your pages will load quick from your hard disc than visitors will see from their modems. After publishing your site go round to a friend who uses a different ISP and see how good the performance of your site rates with their modem
Honour the law on copyright - don't put music, either written or aural, on your site without the permission of the copyright holder(s)
Some people like frames; some don't. Remember that if you use frames you'll alienate a proportion of your visitors before they've even read a word. Alienating your supporters is not a good idea
K.I.S.S.
Use meta tags. Search engines, such as the Brass Band Portal, use the description field, so make use of them
Visit http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com
Your website is an important advertisement and ultimate control on it and its content must always lie with your committee and never the webmaster, a single individual or an external web design company
From Graham Nasby: Don't leave people guessing where you are. On both your front and contact pages, list your town, county/state/province and country. If an event organiser is looking to book a band, they won't book you if they don't know that you are close.
People visit your site to find out about you, not for news of bands from miles away, so don't include news feeds from general sites even if they are banding sites.

See how your website measures up - try our free Site Survey!