One of the issues I see on a daily basis, especially when artists are submitting music to be played on our radio show, is that they don’t have the important items on their website easily accessible. I implore them to think about three things, and this can be applied to just about any business’s website:

1. What are people looking for when they hit your site? (The cream.)
2. Can they find what they’re looking for easily? (Has it risen?)
3. How can you capture some of their contact information? (Can you get them to taste the cream?)

…I think number 3 missed the cream metaphor a bit, but you get the idea.

As many of you probably do, most musicians – at least at the beginning of their careers – are creating their own websites and managing their own social media. When they slap up their websites, the forget what people are looking for when they come to their site – THEIR MUSIC. It’s amazing how many musician/artist/band sites don’t make this easy.

When people hit a musician’s site they’re also looking for contact information, where they have their next gig scheduled, and where they can buy an album, single or merchandise.

So… MAKE THIS STUFF EASY TO FIND. Keep a player as near to the top of every page on your music site as you can, and have “Contact” and “Gigs” in your menu bar. If it’s not easy, the visitor will leave in as little at 15 seconds.

I can hear you thinking, “But Justin, isn’t this just one big obvious point?”

I wish it was.

Testing time.

Let’s take your website for a moment and do a little test. If you don’t have your own, use someone else’s. It doesn’t even have to be a music website, this test will work for anything. Follow these three steps:

1. Considering the industry that the website resides, list the top three things you as a visitor (important to put yourself in the visitor’s shoes if this is your own website) would be looking for if you came to this site for the first time.
2. Set a timer for 15 seconds, and start it. (This one works: http://www.online-stopwatch.com/eggtimer-countdown/full-screen/)
3. Try to find all three things before your 15 seconds is up.

Did you do it? How many pages or links did you have to click through to find those three things? Are you still on the site you started on? Sometimes, there will be links off the main page for the information that they should be providing on their own website, that’s a bad sign too.

The next test is to have a friend or a stranger try this while you watch – it’s a simple usability test that will give you so much information about your website in a very short time.

Questions? Want to share what you found out? You can respond directly to this email and I’ll read every response.

Share this with your friends and see how their websites measure up.

Make sure that cream has risen!

 

~JW