I think I'm talking about complex stuff, trying to stay away from the obvious, but stating the obvious at times anyway. I just had a conversation with an artist. I'm finding that resisting the obvious is really all that is required right now. Yikes!
You need to be on the net, and not on what I call a template site. (I will, for the rest of this article, call such a site a "temsit", "tempsit", "temmie", "templesit", or "tpltsite". ) That should not be your all-all-end-all presence. Please … do not … try to solve your net problem … by getting one of these. What is a temsit? Well, it looks like a template because everyone else has got one. A web host says, "Come to me, my pretties. Come one, come all, and I will sell for an incredibly inexpensive site – and lookie here: I will also practically create the site for you. pictures. "
Artist, if you want something like that, do not pay – not one dime. Get a blog on WordPress or Blogger. Go now … and get a blog. That is all you need. I guarantee you this will be as easy, cost a lot less, and do what a tempsit would do for you – and more. Art on a blog is more prestigious. The tempsit art website looks unprofessional. I'm sorry to say that, but it is true. And what gets me is that a lot of the artists that do this thing, they think they've solved their problem and that the tpltsite looks great.
Compare the temmie to a gallery site or to an artist site that is not such a site – in other words, the artist either created the site or paid someone to webmaster the site. If you look at the tempsit and compare it to the genuine website, you may notice, besides the obvious, that the artist's temsit looks like an awful lot of other sites, that the website has a lot more pictures on it, and the pictures are larger. Yes, this is because you get LESS bandwidth. You get less space to put your pictures and display them properly. Your pics are small on the temmie.
Artist, your temmie looks bad. Someone's got to tell you. I'm sorry to have to be the bearer of this bad news. Do not blame me for being honest.
Templesit companies, please do not get angry with me. I know you have a purpose, an important one at that. You are, in effect, a social site. You are simply a social site that the artist pays for. That's completely okay. In fact, that's great.
So let me be clear: I do not want to dissuade you from creating what I call a templesit. What I want to steer you away from: Thinking you have a presence on the web because you have a template site. A tmplsit can create traffic to your blog or website. But a temmie is NOT a website.
And now for what's coming up on this series of articles decrying templesits and the like: Why do musicians think all they need is a MySpace page? But … that's another installation.