Well, it’s a new year filled with opportunities for your music and your career. It’s also a good opportunity to give your website a fresh new look. Here are just some of the ways you can make your website feel new and exciting again in the new year:
1. Change the Music
If you’ve had the same music on your site for a while, why not change it up a little for the new year? You don’t have to remove your most popular songs of course, you should always have those on there, but you can add some new songs, or other songs on your album that didn’t get any attention on your website before.
If you’re a Bandzoogle member, you can use our detailed music data to measure which songs are working better than others. If certain songs are being skipped over, change them out for new ones and keep testing to see what works.
2. Add New Photos
You can also think about changing up the photos you’ve been using on your site. You still have that old photo of the band in front of a brick wall? Time to change it! If you already did a professional photo shoot, maybe you can use some different photos from that same series to freshen up the look of your site. Or, you can go back for another photoshoot to completely change things up.
We cannot overstate the importance of using professional photos on your website. It brings the look of a site up to a whole new level. So if you don’t have professional photos on your site, you should make one of your goals in the new year to plan a photoshoot with a professional photographer. Not your friend/uncle/cousin who owns a digital camera, but someone who makes their living at it.
If you have a tight budget, you can try contacting your local college/university to see if they have a photography program. You might be able to find a student to do a photoshoot for cheap to add to their portfolio. Or, you can always try bartering with a photographer. Maybe you play ukulele and there’s a photographer out there that really wants to learn. You can trade ukulele lessons for some pro photos. Everybody wins.
Bonus: Another idea is to add Interactive Photos to your website. By using ThingLink, you can make those personal and stock photos interactive with audio and video players, social links and social sharing. Here’s a blog post explaining how: Add Interactive Photos to your Bandzoogle Website with ThingLink
3. Add New Videos
You do have videos on your website, right? You should at least have your best video featured on your Homepage, and preferably a full video gallery on your site as well. So you could change out your featured video on your Homepage to drive up views on a different video, or add some new videos to your gallery.
And remember, you don’t need expensive editing software to make videos for your website. Check out our blog post: How to edit videos for your website without fancy software (for free!)
4. Change the Background Image
Another way to freshen up the look of your website is to change the background image. You can use a photo from your photo shoot, album artwork, stock images, or simply a repeating texture. If you want to be really fancy, you can even create different background images for each page of your site.
Melanie from support has written several blog posts outlining how to make great background images for your website:
Behind the Scenes – Make a great background for your website!
Make a great music website background part 2: The Seamless Texture
Make a great music website background part 3: Creating different backgrounds
Band Website Design Tip: Make a repeating background for any screen size
5. Change the Template
One sure way to freshen up your website is to change the look completely by switching to a different template. You can choose from the hundreds of different templates available, or you can choose to create your own custom template using our Custom Style Editor.
If you want to try creating your own template, the previously mentioned blog posts about Background Images will be very helpful, as well as these posts that go over custom designs, header images, color schemes, and fonts:
A Crash Course in Custom Designs
Website Design tip #97: Selecting Colour Schemes
Musicians: Learn How to Properly use Fonts on Your Blog (and Website)
Have you changed the look of your website recently? If so, post the link in the comments and tell us what’s new about it!
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