A shiny new website and how to save money upgrading yours

I couldn’t take it any longer.

Richie Beirach’s broken-down website built sometime late in the Bronz Age was begging to be taken out of its misery. Broken links, decades-old news, and the original “Under Construction” header message were not doing him any favors.

Like a lot of musicians, Richie didn’t think it mattered. After all, web sites are just static digital business cards sitting somewhere in that mysterious void called the cloud. Who cares?!

But, to his credit, he relented and trusted me to build him a nice modern showcase of his 50+ year prolific career. He now has a place at www.richiebeirach.com containing his books, various videos, a robust discography, his favorite personal photos, and the means for fans to get in touch.

I built Richie’s site using Bandzoogle. If you participated in the last Jazz Master Summit, you’ll remember Bandzoogle as a sponsor and their Vice President of Business Development, Dave Cool, as one of the speakers.

It wasn’t that long ago that building websites was hard. It took experts in coding and graphic design, and all that was expensive. But for the typical musician or band, those days are thankfully over.

Let me give Bandzoogle a shoutout because before doing Richie’s site, I had dabbled with Bandzoogle while helping friends but I was never into it that deeply.

Bandzoogle has done a fantastic job creating a website builder that is simple to use and full of the right tools for putting together a beautiful and fully functional site with the necessary bells and whistles for today’s musician.

I also want to sing the praises of their support staff. Throughout 7-day/week chat accessibility, these friendly people bent over backward to answer my questions, offer solutions, and even create short on-the-fly videos to illustrate their answers to my making the most of the platform.

This is not the norm these days with tech support thinned out in many companies due to the virus. Kudos to Bandzoogle for maintaining their investment in customer support!

Building or re-building your site

If you watched my Summit interview with Dave Cool last fall you heard lots of good reasons to own a functional website.

• Build your audience
• Showcase your music
• Sell your music and merchandise
• Once we start playing live again, provide fans with your performance calendar
• Give people a way to reach out to you
• Show off who you are

With their sponsorship of the Summit over, I’m not paid to promote Bandzoogle. I just believe that it is an important technology for musicians. And if not now, when will the time be better to create or update your presence on the web?

I told Dave Cool that I was writing this and he offered readers a discount code good for three free months of Bandzoogle plus 15% off for the rest of the first year.

If you create or update your site, please send me a link so I can see what you built and maybe even show it off in a future post.