Make sure your website is friendly to multiple web browsers. This is a no brainer: if someone can't view your site, they can't read what you have to say. It's also rather annoying –perhaps even rude--when, a website site tell me I need to download Internet Explorer. I use Firefox running on Linux. They do not make Internet Explorer for Linux and even if they did who says I would download it just to go to your website.

Allow users to listen to samples of your music. Lets face it your good looks are not going to sell albums, your music will. You need to decide whether you want to let them be able to listen to whole songs or just samples. Make sure that you put the files in formats that can be listened to by the most users. I'd recommend putting your music files in at least two file formats. This maximizes the chances that your listeners will have the software required to listen to the files. I'd recommend putting your files in mp3 and ogg. Mp3 can be played on on a lot of different computer systems and the chances are good that if the user has sound on his computer, he can play mp3s. Ogg is a nice backup, in case the user can't play mp3s. The nice thing about ogg is that it is not patented, which means that anyone can create software that plays ogg files. You can find free ogg players for Mac, Windows, and Linux. To learn more about ogg go to http://www.vorbis.com/ Using these two formats will maximize your users ability to listen to your music.

The second thing to consider when putting music on the Internet is what are they allowed to do with it once it's downloaded. Are they allowed to burn it to a CD? Are they allowed to make copies for friends? Can they make changes to your music? Can they put the song on their website? Don't assume that you visitors know. Tell them clearly what they can and cannot do with you music.

Keep it up to date.

Because modern Catholic bands tend to have fairly small followings, fans want to know that your band is still active. If I go to a website of a Catholic band and it hasn't been updated in a couple of years, I may just assume that the band split up and they haven't taken down their website yet. It's very hard to get excited about a band that looks like it's fizzling out. Just giving your fans some updates on what is happening with the band will keep the the fans interested. It doesn't have to be everyday. Just a little message from the band once or twice a month will go along way. An easy way to do this is by setting up a blog. A blog is often described as an online journal, although it can be used for much more than this. Anytime you want to give readers periodic updates, you can use a blog. A blog is very easy to run. It much easier than creating a new html page for each update. They usually work like a one way discussion board. You type a message in the box and press the submit button.

Don't forget the little things

A couple of little things that are easily forgotten. Don't forget to put a title on your web page. The title goes between <title> </title> html tags. If you use software that creates the html for you, then make sure that it puts a title on your web pages. When users search for your website the title is what they will see on the search engine's listings. It also shows up in the title bar of the web browser. If you don't have a title, your web page will show up as “untitled” -- which isn't very cool.

Finally consider creating a favicon.ico file. This is the little picture that shows up by the website name in the favorites list. It also shows up by the URL. If you want to see an example, type in google.com in your web browser. After you hit enter, look at the URL box –where you just typed in google.com. See the little “G.” That was put there because you web browser looked for a little image file call “favicon.ico.” It may be small but it just a little something to your website.