Our latest service – PremiumBandSites.com

Like a lot of people in the web design space, I got started many years ago just helping out some friends who needed a website. I had some programming skills and knew my way around HTML so people would often ask for my help. Because of my background in the music business, a lot of the friends asking for help were musicians and bands. Most times I just did them for free or a few beers and that was that. I have to be really honest and say that I never chased bands & musicians to do their sites simply because most had very little money to spend and development time is expensive. Instead, I focussed on doing sites for businesses and organisations that I could charge a decent amount for and just did the band sites as a hobby. This bothered me a bit though. I’ve worked in and around the music business for close to 30 years so it is an industry very close to my heart and to see how many musicians were struggling with the technical and financial problems of being online worried me.

Fast forward a few years to late 2015. I was going through a process of tidying up my business systems and decided that I had to either do something to make these band sites easier to look after, or I had to ditch them altogether and stop doing it. The general maintenance on them was still taking up too much time. Sure, I could ignore the regular maintenance like so many people do, but this is a recipe for disaster. I’d already had to fix a number of sites over the years that had been hacked due to out of date software and believe when I tell you, that isn’t fun! The other problem was that they were scattered across a number of different hosting platforms, some better than others.

Rather than ditch them altogether I began a process of standardising the whole thing so that they all shared a common hosting and software platform. This made the difference. Suddenly, instead of having to maintain a dozen different setups, we only had one common platform to look after. All of our hosted sites now share an identical back end consisting of a content management system and high performance, rock solid hosting that gets backed up and scanned for malware daily. While all of the backend systems are now standardised, the frontend side, the bit the World actually sees, is completely customisable so every site is unique. I was able to fine tune the whole system to suit bands and musicians alone, while taking all the time consuming technical headaches away.

Okay, so now that had my own problem fixed it occurred to me that this was a service we could offer to other Musicians and Bands to make their online experience so much easier and PremiumBandSites.com was born. It is still in its early stages but we are now entering the phase where we will open it up to new customers so we can test and polish it to see if it is something that Musicians actually want. In the next week we will be opening up for an initial round of testing and will be offering a very sweet deal to the first batch of testers. If you’re a Musician, either solo or in a Band and you’d like some help taking the pain out of your website experience, then head over to PremiumBandSites.com now and drop us an email. I’d be only too happy to talk to you to see if I can help.