Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Back Pain and Ch. 3 of Ariel Hyatt's book – Optimizing Your Website

Happy New Year everyone!

Chapter 3 in Ariel's book involves optimizing a band website. Many of the things she recommends are consistent with the current version of our band's site. For example, she recommends having a quickly-loading site with no flash intro. Some of the things she suggests we added this summer, inspired by an online presentation by Carla Lynne Hall and Kavit Haria.

Their presentation also influenced our decision to have a very simple site for now, as a transition before we release our new EP. The current site replaced one which was designed to match our last CD's art (both the site and the CD were beautifully designed by the band's drummer Kim Lindquist). Here's a look at the home page of the old site:



Once Kim is finished with the art for the new EP, our band web site will be updated to match it (as well as other places our band is online, as much as they're customizable), which goes along with Ariel's suggestions to have a consistent look and feel.

Ariel also recommends having our elevator story/pitch (see the previous blog post) on our web site. We already had it there (as well as on our facebook, ReverbNation & twitter pages), but there were several other DSP pages online where I added it: cdbaby, myspace (do many people use myspace anymore?), our 'Electronic Press Kit', Garage Band, our Portland Mercury band page, and also this blog! I did not manage, however, to update our Veganica page yet, as I still haven't received an email response for my 'forgotten password'....

And what pitch did we use (those of you who've read the previous blog post may ask)? For now we are sticking with the original pitch:

“Demimonde Slumber Party sounds like a 60's surf musical starring David Bowie, Sleater-Kinney, & the B-52s’ Fred Schneider as the crazy uncle...”

This alternate one is currently in second place:

“Demimonde Slumber Party sounds like a remake of “A Hard Day's Night” created by the B-52s & starring Sleater-Kinney.”

But it may be good to decide whether or not to change our pitch – and what to change it to – until after our new EP comes out - & see if people compare our sound to completely different artists...

We also made a few changes to our web site to make it more obvious that we are giving away free song downloads if you join our email list!

And oh yeah, one more thing – if you've gotten this far, you may be wondering why the title of this post starts with 'Back Pain'... Well, I've got it. Pretty bad right now. It is definitely something that is fairly incompatible with playing a heavy electric guitar and moving guitar amps. Or even sitting and typing at a computer. Well, luckily the pain meds are working right now!

See you next time,
Melissa

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Oh this is a good one: “Demimonde Slumber Party sounds like a remake of “A Hard Day's Night” created by the B-52s & starring Sleater-Kinney.”

Good luck with your back...