I get a lot of questions from my clients about building a website:
“How do I build a website for my business?”
“What do I put on it?”
“How many pages does it have to be?”
“What should my bio look like”
I have been teaching how to structure websites for YEARS. (It goes hand-in-hand with building a business, but not in the way you think.)
In fact, I’ve taught website structure for 5 years at the university level. It was the #1 thing my students needed to do to complete my course, in addition to building a music business plan.
My students were required to build their websites in a way that was more than just incorporating promotional materials – they were taught to take a step back and see their entire value proposition.
The first few semesters of incorporating a website build, I asked them to complete it prior to writing a business plan.
But I realized my students weren’t exactly “getting” the assignment.
What were they missing?
The full-fledged identity – the soul – behind the business. So I switched it up. I started having my students delve into their business identity first, and then they built their websites.
I was so inspired by the profound changes that came from this, and it was so much more thought-provoking for my students.
My students saw themselves very differently while building their websites, from when they first started the semester.
When they were creating websites in semester 1, I ended up with a bunch of sites that basically read like this:
“Yeah… I teach piano…”
That’s all they could say because they hadn’t discovered the why!
The real change came when they started asking themselves the big questions:
What do you really want to do in your life?
What do you stand for?
What’s your WHY?
So by the time they finished their business plans, they had completely changed. They were different people. The way they talked about themselves was different.
The tendency to create according to the standards of the industry was completely abolished when they started by thinking of their brand identity as a whole.
Instead of fitting a box, modeling their bio after every bio they’d read their entire lives, they wanted to be different from everyone else.
(They finally “got” it!!)
They started compiling materials in a way that created a beautiful synchronicity in the structure of it all, instead of just throwing up a headshot and a bio.
On Monday, July 19th at 11am CST, I will be presenting a live website workshop where I’ll be walking you through how to design your own website with all of this in mind (you can skip the steps of the business plan, for now, my method will get you to reflect on ALL of that while considering your website structure).
I’ll walk you through my newly re-designed website, explaining the criteria and rationale behind it, and as a live bonus, I will be doing LIVE WEBSITE AUDITS for the first 3 people who sign up.
If you know a musician who has been thinking about improving their website, feel free to forward this invitation.
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