First off, let’s address the elephant in the room: do musicians even need websites anymore? With social media and other platforms free and so easy to use, isn’t that enough for fans and audiences to find you? And the answer is yes. FaceBook, Instagram or TikTok can be a fantastic way to alert fans to upcoming events, to engage them
There are as many types of author websites as there are types of authors – or at least genres of literature. A site for a romance author will have a different look and feel than one for an author of cyber-punk westerns or, more to the point, authors of non-fiction: business advice, self-help, biography, history and so on. Fundamentally, your
For most website owners the dream is to just hand over the keys to the site to someone else to handle all the maintenance, updates, design decisions, security, registrations, licenses, hosting issues, and all the related “tech” stuff that feels so bothersome. And, of course, this is possible, but it’s not the budget option. And, to be honest, it may not be the wisest option.
Lots of digital service providers — web designers and developers, SEO professionals, copy writers, branding agencies — like to give back to their communities and offer pro bono work (i.e. free services) to businesses and non-profits who may otherwise not be able to afford a professional-looking or fully-featured website with carefully crafted copy optimized for the best search results. It’s
Design Matters
Such a cliché! So bland and trite a truism that I generally forget that it is true!
But this week I had a pretty visceral illustration of the power of design – whether in support of the forces of good or of evil.
The background is that I’ve been doing design work for a very small classical record label for more than 15 years. High quality recordings, but a pretty small, niche market. I don’t know what the sales are, but print runs are short…
For the record, this isn’t going to be about recommending my favorite web hosting companies, or dissing companies that I think are terrible (though I could do both!). What I’m really concerned about is making sure that people who “own” websites have some basic understanding of what they are paying for each month or year from the website budget. Sadly,
Okay, not officially. But it sure seems like hacked is the new black. I had barely cleaned the New Year’s confetti out of my ears before I was called upon to reconstruct a WordPress site that had been completely taken down by some malicious files. Luckily, the database hadn’t been attacked, and I had a relatively recent set of site