The BEST musician and band websites: interview with our Technical Director, Dan Coe

by Mike Neal

Dan, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to do this interview.

Firstly, let’s get a bit of background. How long have you been involved in creating band and musician websites?

I’ve been working in the music industry and making band and record label websites now for nearly 20 years! We’ve worked with everyone from musicians starting out in their garage all the way to stadium rock bands, so have a pretty good understanding of what artists need from their website at each stage of their career.

How many band or musician websites do you think you have created roughly?

I’ve actually recently compiled a list of all the music artists and bands we’ve worked with over the years and there are nearly 300 artists on the list, many with multiple websites and campaigns! 

I forget that I’ve been fortunate to work with a lot of huge names and there are some pretty heavy hitters on the list; The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Elton John, The Who, Metallica, Katy Perry to name a few.

Before we get into your favourite current musician websites, can you tell us which of the ones that you/your company have designed, past or current, that you’d consider your favourites and why?

Duff McKagan https://duffonline.com

Most recent website design and build. Always been a big Guns N’ Roses fan and this has everything including full discography, career and timeline. This one really pushed the traditional idea of a WordPress website with some really nice animations and page loading.

 

 

Deaf Havana https://deafhavana.com

One of my personal favourite bands I’ve followed since they started out so was a pleasure to work for them. The website has been through several iterations, the latest is actually our very own Bandtheme.

 

 

NIN https://nin.com

I’m a long term fan so it was a pleasure to design and build the WordPress website and Shopify store.

Great stuff. So what, in your view, makes a great band/musician website?

Fast loading times.

Nice design and clearly laid out content. Most of the time I’ll be checking a band website out for tour dates or news on a new release and don’t/ shouldn’t have to dig around for that information.

Decent content – why do so many bands have low resolution versions of their own artwork on their own website?!

Simple testing! Amazes me when obvious things that just don’t work – only last week I tried to buy a band t-shirt and it kept failing despite multiple attempts and different payment types, in the end I abandoned, sale lost!

Oh and might sound obvious, but being able to Google it! Let’s not forget CHVRCHES had to change their name because no one could find anything about them…

Okay, let’s get into your current top 5 websites:

https://www.paulmccartney.com (Sennep)

https://www.nickcave.com  (The Creative Corporation)

https://rollingstones.com (Modern English)

https://duffonline.com  (The Creative Corporation)

https://georgeharrison.com  (The Creative Corporation)