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Creating a Music Website
The music industry is changing. Once upon a time the only
way to make and sell records was to get a deal with a record
company. Today, more and more musicians are going it alone.
Building their own studios, recording their own albums and
doing the marketing for themselves. The advantages are
obvious--total creative freedom
and a greater slice of the
retail price finding its way back to the musician. There is
one big disadvantage, however--without the power of the
record company how is a musician going to reach the public?
What's new, and what makes it possible for a musician to
reach the greatest possible market is the Internet. With
your own website you can join the ever growing number of
musicians and bands who are marketing and selling their
music on the Internet.
Creating a Music Website takes you through the basics of
setting up your own site, points out some of the pitfalls,
and helps you to produce your own unique presence on the
Internet. It introduces HTML, shows you how to brighten up
your site with graphics, tables, and frames. You'll learn
how to add files of your own music, even a band video, and
if you fancy selling your music off your website, the book
addresses the vexed question of selling on the Internet.
Written by a man who's been there and done that
(check out www.musicfromthemountains.com ) this book will
help you bring your music to a worldwide audience.
* Designing your site
* Adding text, pictures, sound and video
* Streaming sound
* MP3 files
* Uploading files to your site
* Using Search Engines to get your site noticed
* Selling your music on the web
* Frequently asked questions
* Which software to use
Contents
Questions, questions, questions
What exactly Is the Internet? What's a browser? Home page/web site - what's the difference? What is a URL? How does my web site get onto the ISPs server? I'm a Mac user - is that going to make any difference? What's HTML? Can someone do it for me?
Making a start
How do I set about creating a site? Designing the site. Navigation. Constructing the site. Authoring software. Page structure. Colour. Hex code. Background colour. Font size. Headings. Fonts. Lists.
Working with graphics
Pictures on the web. File formats. Adding pictures. Recap. Tiled backgrounds. Text as pictures. Animated GIFS. 216 colours.
Adding links
Text links Picture links Anchors. Thumbnails. Image maps. Mail me. Links outside. Targets. Link philosophy. Home page links.
So far, so good!
What you know so far.
Tables and frames
Tables. Table tags. More table tags. COLSPAN, ALIGN and ROWSPAN tags. Frames. So, how do we go about it? Naming frames. Wot, no frames? You've been framed.
Testing, testing, one, two, three
Putting music on your site
Plug in for sound! Helpers and plug-ins. To stream or not to stream. Pick of the bunch. MP3. Players and encoders. Preparing for encoding. Encoding for MP3. Encoding for RealAudio. Encoding for Quicktime. Getting your file onto your site. MIDI. Embedding files. Video.
Publish and be damned!
Better mousetrap. Register your site. META tags. Site maintenance.
Selling on the net
Cheque or credit card? Other possibilities. MP3 sales.
And finally
Domain names. Is that it, then? So where to from here?
Checklist
Frequently asked questions
Web resources and software
Index Index
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