Looking for Input/Examples of DDJT Members websites…

Until you have become pretty well known its not worth setting up a website. Using sites like Facebook fan pages…myspace and Twitter will be more than enough. Instead of investing in websites get business cards with all your information.

Mix Cloud is a great site to post your mixes as its free and doesnt have a cap.

Hee Won Jung, post: 13868, member: 948 wrote: Until you have become pretty well known its not worth setting up a website. Using sites like Facebook fan pages…myspace and Twitter will be more than enough.

I strongly disagree with this. Starting out, I made myself a website and a set of good “designer” business cards.. it worked magic for me: everyone has a Facebook fan page, Twitter or what not and that’s the reason why saying you have a website of your own gets pretty positive reactions. Even if it’s a basic cheap site like mine 🙂

I found HostLeet to be very god for DDJT until we outgrew them.

OK…I thought I posted a reply here, but I guess I didn’t.

I think it’s important for any DJ who wants to be professional to have a website. It’s not about if you’ve played a certain number of years or not, but more about when you’re going to hit up promoters and such for gigs. It’s a piece of marketing material…like your press kit, demo CD, and business cards.

I’ve heard many who believe a social media page is all you need. I disagree. A marketing campaign now is like an octopus. Each tentacle is an arm of that. So the flyers you made are one. The decals you gave out are another. The mixes you posted on mixcloud are another. Your Facebook page is another. Your demo CDs are another. You get the point.

The “central spot” though is where you want all those tentacles to pull people into. That’s your website. The website is where you will send people to when you want them to download your mix, find your other social media connections, read your blog (if you have one), find out where you’re playing, and how to contact you. No matter how much you think you can, you just won’t get all that on social media pages.

I still tell any DJ when you think about your name, go on dotster.com and look to see how easily you can get a domain name for it. I got lucky with d-jam.com, but I bought it back in 2000. Nowadays it’s getting harder.

For hosting I have two recommendations. Hostpebble.com is a local guy I work with. He’s solid and very open…so you won’t have him give you flack when you post MP3s and share them with people. I’m talking about mixes here. A lot of hosts now give you bandwidth limits and other restrictions. So you post a few mixes and suddenly your site is locked down.

1and1.com is my other recommendation. They’re a bigger company and also very solid.

As for building, you can go the DIY route and perhaps use Coffee Cup HTML with GIMP. I would tell you though if you don’t know anything about HTML that you should try a 3rd Party setup like WordPress. It’s so easy and customizable within reason. Yeah your site won’t be “over the top” looking cool, but it will look good for your needs.

You can pay dotster.com $15 a year for a domain and $4 a month for hosting. Not a big price point for all you end up with.