How to Design Your Music Website

Whether you’re an individual musician or a firm involved in selling or promoting music, you need to do a few things to market yourself. One of those things is to establish a website. However, creating a music website isn’t the same as a creating any other website.

There are a few key ingredients that go into the mix to create good music websites that stand out. This is exactly why so many musicians and music-based businesses have a problem getting things right. To be more specific, most of the problems crop up on the design side of things.

After all, this is a music website we’re talking about and music is art… and if you want your art to stand out, you need to make sure that everything about it is unique and far away from the mainstream. At the same time, you also need to make sure that what you’re doing is appealing. All of this applies to your website as well.

So, what does it take to create a perfect music website? Are there any key considerations to be made? These are the kind of questions that are likely to be circling in your head. Well, we’ve got all the answers lined up for you right here.

Keep it professional

It’s always a good idea to use professional images on your site, whether it’s of you, your band, or of artists represented by your brand. Makes sure you also use a wide variety of images. Images are a core part of web design and, pretty much, the starting point for proper web design.

In fact, images play an even more significant role in a music website. Their use on such sites is diverse and widespread. This is because images are what typical visitors on a music site will look a first.

So, if you want to make that first great impression with your site, professionally shot images are a must.

Keep it clean

The next major aspect of a music site, or any site for that matter, is a clean layout. Visitors want things to be easy and a clean, well-organized layout helps meet their expectations. After all, you want them to explore your site without any hiccups.

Start off by finding a template that meets your requirements. Once you do that, shift your attention to individual elements and sort them out one by one.

One strategy that works well is positioning your homepage as a portal to the rest of the site. Use a catchy ‘call to action’ to draw in audiences. Then, design the rest of the pages to focus on specific topics. Ideally, stick to one topic per page. For instance, your bio page must only contain your bio and nothing else.

Similarly, your gallery must only contain images and your portfolio page must only showcase your music/talent. You can include basic details about various music projects if necessary.

Your visitors aren’t going to spend more than a few minutes going through your site. So, you have very little time to make an impact on them. So, avoid cluttering up the pages. Stick to the ‘keep it simple’ rule.

One standard technique to create a simple layout involves leveraging white space. White space is the space that surrounds your images and text. In other words, it’s the space that’s been left unused. A clean layout must contain plenty of white space. Apart from providing an organized look, whitespace can also create emphasis, which is a good thing.

Keep it cohesive

When choosing colors or graphic elements, make sure they reflect your image or brand. One way to do this is by referring to the images you’re currently using. Pick a few colors from the image and contrast them with the rest of the visual content.

Other than that, pay attention to color psychology. Studies have shown that colors have an impact on people’s perceptions and that they do carry meaning. For instance, brown is symbolic of earth and would be great for music that is earthy or mellow. In fact, if you look at sites associated with the genre of heavy metal or any other metal sub-genre, you’d notice that most of them make use of dark colors, especially black. This is because metal as a genre is associated with darkness, sorrow, aggression, and power etc. These emotions are also typically associated with the color black.

Ideally, you’ll need three colors – primary, secondary, and tertiary. Your primary color should be the one reflecting the overall theme of the website. The secondary color is necessary for contrast and the tertiary color is the accent color.

Keep it legible

Of course, no site is complete without textual content. Textual content is necessary to complement visual content. If you want something to be conveyed clearly and in detail, text is your best bet because its practical.

However, when using textual elements, make sure you use an appropriate font. The most basic requirement, with regard to fonts, is readability. The font you choose must make reading easy or at the very least, avoid making things difficult. So, the font for your primary content must be simple and legible.

Next, make sure you opt for the right color as well. The font color must be in stark contrast with the background color. For example, black on white or vice versa. This is the most effective way to make sure that the text grab’s people’s attention.

Finally, never forget consistency. Ideally, you must use the same font throughout the entire site. However, that might be difficult to do in some cases. If you are ever forced to use a different font, at least ensure that it shares a similar style with the primary font choice.

But, in the case of text used on your images and your musical content, you can go wild as long as the style of the music you’re marketing suits the font choice.

So, there you have it – a few basic tips on getting your music site design right. However, if you’re having trouble, it’s always better to get professional help. Get in touch with Crafted for more information.