It always surprises me when I see drummers and other musicians who don’t have their own website. I mean, this is 2020! Long gone are the days when you had to pay a web development company thousands of dollars just to put up a basic website for your drumming services.
Personally, I’ve been building my own drumming and music websites for many years. I also worked as a full-time web developer for 3 years. Through all those years, I learned that putting up a website can be either painfully difficult, or incredibly simple. Today I’m going to show you the simple way.
The 4 Steps
- Step 1: Go to bluehost.com and purchase hosting. There are many hosting companies available. I’ve been using Bluehost for all my websites for many years. I recommend Bluehost because they’re very inexpensive, they’re very reliable, and have always given me great customer service anytime I’ve needed their help. You probably don’t need anything special in the beginning, just their most basic, least expensive hosting option which at the moment is just $3.95 a month. It’s actually gone down since I started using it several years ago. Sweet!
- Step 2: Purchase a domain name at Bluehost. This is your URL-for instance www.johnsmithdrums.com. You’ll have to type names in their search engine and find a name that’s available. If at all possible, purchase a .com url, rather than a .net, etc. It’s simply easier for people to find you.
- Step 3: Go to your cpanel(control panel). Scroll down and click “Install WordPress.” Bluehost offers a one-click install for WordPress, which is another reason I recommend their hosting. I’ve been using WordPress for many years. It’s a free program. It’s constantly updated as the internet changes from year to year. It provides a simple way to have a website that you can easily update yourself with new articles, pictures, videos, sound files, etc. There really isn’t any reason why most people need to know anything at all about programming to use WordPress, making it ideal for the average user.
- Step 4: Click the “install” button for the free WordPress install to your website. Click “Advanced Options.” You can change your username, password and site title here if you want. You can always change these later too. Write these down as you’ll need them later to login to your website. Click “install now.” It will probably take a few minutes to load.
That’s basically it. That’s all it takes to get a basic website up. The site should now be available at http://www.etc.com/wp-admin/.
Insert the url name for your website rather than etc. Mine is /wp-admin/. You should be able to login and post pictures, articles, etc.
Other Drumming Website Tips
- Regardless of whether you use Bluehost, or some other company for your hosting, pick a paid option, rather than a free option. Free options come with lots of restrictions that will get in your way down the road as you continue to develop the website.
- On your website WordPress control panel, click on “Appearance”, and “Themes”. You can change the overall look of your website by just changing themes. This is another great thing about WordPress. These themes can also be customized. You can change pictures, backgrounds, etc. This being the case, you don’t need to pick a drumming or music theme. You can just change pictures to make the theme look the way you want.
- To create drumming notation I use a free program called MuseScore. I save my music files as png’s. I upload these into the my WordPress Media Library, just like regular photos. I then add them to my pages, again just like adding a photo to the page.
- There is a bit of a learning curve with WordPress. The good news is that there is lots of documentation available online anytime you have questions or problems. WordPress.org is a good place to start.
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