"Promote Your Art Effectively With Your Website" by Samuel Stokes

from the May 2010 issue of KC Stage

The World Wide Web has made it possible for everyone from White House officials to household pets to have their own websites for professional or personal purposes. Websites can be extremely useful for promoting your artwork, band, theatre, or other performing arts group. However, some websites fall short of what they could be because of simple matters of organization, most of which can be easily remedied. The purpose of this article is to suggest simple ways that a promotional website can be made easier to navigate, more interesting, and attract more visitors.

Organization is the Key

Have you ever visited a website expecting to easily find one small piece of information only to be frustrated 15 minutes later when it continues to elude you? When designing your website, put yourself in the shoes of the visitor. If you were visiting the site, what kind of information might you want to know about the artwork or performing artists? The time and location of upcoming performances or art showings should be prominently displayed on the home page or on a page directly linked from the home page. It is also very helpful to include maps of the locations of your shows, which can easily be done by typing the street address into maps.google.com and then making a link to the resulting web address from your website. If you are selling items such as paintings or CDs (or digital music for download) this should also be easily accessible from the home page. After all, the ultimate goal of your website is to facilitate people in investing their time and/or money supporting your artwork.

First impressions are very important. Therefore, for ease of navigation, it is best to keep your home page short. You want visitors to see what your website has to offer at a glance without having to scroll down the page to find important information. Sub-pages can be longer, since by time visitors navigate to them they already have an idea of what they are looking for. Having a good menu system, such as with a top bar or a side bar on every page, is extremely important. It helps the visitor remember what other options there are. When visitors reaches a “dead end” on a website they have the choice of tediously clicking the “back” button until they find the menu options or they may choose to navigate away from your site.

Furthermore, it is very important for all pages to be legible. Picture backgrounds may be very interesting to look at, but if the text on top of them is difficult to read, some visitors will not bother to try. Visitors should in no way be inconvenienced in finding the information they desire. People with color deficiencies are especially sensitive to this issue. To ensure that your site is legible for people with color deficiencies, you may test your web pages with the “Colorblind Web Page Filter” available at http://colorfilter.wickline.org.

Last but not least, contact information should be extremely easy to find. Many websites have a “Contact Us” menu item, but I recommend that you also include your basic contact information on each page. You can create a simple header or footer with this information and paste it on each page. This way you can ensure that visitors are not wandering aimlessly looking for your e-mail address or phone number.

Attracting Interest

A picture is worth a thousand words. While people are not likely to read through everything on your website verbatim, photographs and even clipart tastefully included throughout the website will draw the visitor’s attention much more thoroughly.

Music and other performing arts websites should include audio or video samples to prove your compositional and/or performance abilities. You may be able to write very eloquently about your own talent, but the proof is in the pudding. There are many options for embedded audio/video players, some of which may be available through your web hosting service. You may also choose to use a free hosting sight such as YouTube to house your videos. This has a double advantage in that you need not use your bandwidth for visitors to view your videos and your videos will now be accessible from the YouTube search engine, potentially drawing more visitors to your site. I recommend that you do not enable the “autoplay” function on any embedded audio/video players. It is incredibly nerve-wracking to navigate a music website and be startled by a music player abruptly starting by itself.

Bringing in the Visitors

A website can only be effective if it is seen. There are many ways to promote your website, but it is very important that you are targeting the right audience when you do so. Sending out mass e-mails to everyone that you have ever known is not necessarily a good strategy. While it may get the word out to a lot of people at once, many are in the habit of deleting these types of e-mails without reading them, and most e-mail providers frown on sending anything even appearing to be an unsolicited advertisement. If you are going to send mass e-mails, you should only send them to fans that have expressed interest in receiving such e-mails. You may wish to have a sign up sheet for your e-mail list at shows, and also have a place to sign up for you e-mail list on your website.

Whenever you are promoting your show with signs or flyers, your website address should be clearly listed along with a small description of what sort of information and multimedia might be found on it. You should always have flyers available at your shows and either distribute them throughout the venue or set them in a prominent place where people are sure to see them. Handing out business cards is also a cheap and effective way to get your information out there.

Make sure that your website address is part of your e-mail signature. This is an effective way to ensure that everyone you e-mail receives a small advertisement about what you do without it being considered spam. If you regularly post on forums, make sure that your web address is included on your signature there as well. Please do ensure that all posts to forums are meaningful and are not simply advertisements that have little or nothing to do with the subject of the thread. Always refer to the forum rules and guidelines before posting.

Finally, here are a few tips on search engine optimization. This involves making your website as visible as possible to search engines such as Google or Yahoo. The most important thing about search engine optimization is to make keywords very prominent on your website. Things such are your name, your group’s name, the city you live or work in, and other identifying information should included throughout your website. However, it is not a good idea to place irrelevant keywords on your website in an attempt to draw in more visitors. Not only is this discourteous and resented by visitors, but search engines are also getting better at filtering such attempts to draw in visitors. Image search engines have now become very popular. Therefore, it is a good idea to add tags to all of your images so that they may be easily found in image search engines.

Samuel Stokes is a composer and playwright in Blue Springs, Mo. For more information, visit http://stokesmusic.tripod.com