How I created a simple band website in just a few minutes

making a blogger website

I'm starting my new band side-project, and the first thing I'm going to do is create a website. 

There are a lot of free options out there to make a website. But I’m going to use Google's blogger platform.

I've used for different websites over the years and I'm comfortable with it.

Another thing is, it also integrates nicely with all of the Google services I already use, including my Gmail account, Google Drive and Google Photos.

The domain is even free if I keep the default blogspot.com address. I can change it to a regular domain at anytime for like 12 bucks a year if I want. Google even lets you do this right in blogger using Google's own domain service.

Main thing is, I want to have:

• somewhere to post my most recent songs for an email download 
• Be able to add upcoming information and/or reviews
• Create an about us page. 

All I need to do is go to blogger.com, log in with my Gmail address and name the site.

Name website

The band name I've chosen to use for this project is Rom-Com. When I first entered that blogspot domain name it was taken, which happens. Probably by some site about romantic comedies? Who knows.

So I added “band” after the name for the URL which was open. Kind of like the band spoon does with their URL - spoontheband.com.

(RELATED: Where to start? I'm pitch music promotion ideas for my band, to myself.)

Makes sense amongst the relevant sites that would show up if people just searched for that name Rom-Com alone. I think adding that will make it more clear anyway.

Choose Template

I chose the “simple” template to start. It defaults to this orange gradient template, which doesn't seem like a simple design at all to me.

I go to the template editor in blogger to change this. I switch it to the plain white design grouped with the other “simple template” design options.

Then I changed some of the font colors, sizes and font styles in the “customize” template section, and save it.

Design

I'm not gonna do anything too fancy with this site. As a mater of fact, I think I'm just going to take an approach similar to sites like medium.com (ironically run by the guy that created blogger and sold it to Google).

So I'm not going to add any images to the design. I’ve decided that I'm going to let the images I add to posts dictate the look. These will mostly be artwork from the single song releases.

Pages

Then I created an “About us” page on the site. This is different than a post, it’s just a standalone page with some information about the band and how to get in touch with us. Save that.

Layout

I arrange the objects for the site in the layout section. I tuned off the blogger “navigation gadget”. It's a blogger branded bar at the top of the website. Don't really want that.

And I also removed the “profile gadget” in the sidebar. It's of my personal profile, nothing to do with the band, so I don't want that either.

Added the “pages gadget” to the cross-col section of the layout and activated the “about us” page I had made. This is going to be my website navigation. Saved that, and the site was up and running. Almost.

After I clicked the view blog button and looked at the site, I didn't like the way the navigation looked. It had a border around it.

So I went back to the customize section in blogger’s template editor like before, and changed the border color to transparent.

Note: In the advanced section of the template designer they call these “tabs” even though in the layout section it's called the pages gadget. And even more confusing, the borders I wanted to change in the tabs are in a different section called “Accents” in the template designer. Don't know what that is all about.

Publish Website

I applied those changes and went back to my new site. Liked that a lot more.

I haven't posted anything on the site yet. I'm going to wait until I have the first single all prepped with a player and some artwork to do that.

If you want to follow along and see how I'm going to do that and all of the other things I'm going to try out as I create this band project from scratch?

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