Posted by DrWahoo on April 5, 2010 at 3:12am
Some of my friends asked me to put a band website together and through some research found out alot of cool low cost services that may challenge my Drupal business model.Tell me your opinons: I think issues like SEO, ownership of content, adding merchandising and if you want to migrate data to a new system maybe the deciding factor....
My first choice may be http://www.bandvista.com/index.php
Because it says the offer newsletters..
Then there is http://www.dynamod.com/learn_more/musicians_websites/?lid=dd
and copy http://bandzoogle.com/
Comments
I'm not sure if I'm 100%
I'm not sure if I'm 100% clear on what you are trying to do. Are you putting together a website for one band, or trying to create a band website platform for multiple bands (to compete with bandzoogle, etc?)
trying to create wesbites for
trying to create wesbites for a band...not a band website platform
Drupal can certainly compete
Drupal can certainly compete with those other sites in terms of functionality. But if you are going to build the site and hand it off to them, consider that they may not be interested in maintaining or upgrading the site. So as long as they are ok with that, or you or someone else can provide support for them, I'd say Drupal is a good bet.
So yea, if you have knowledge and time to deal with Drupal (or building any custom solution) go for it.
Otherwise you could go for the combo approach and use existing website services together to create a whole solution. I.e. soundcloud or bandcamp for hosting and selling of music, tumblr & twitter for blog/news updates, vimeo for video, flickr for photos, and constant contact or google groups for managing a mailing list. All of these websites allow embeddable widgets so all you'd have to do is have a domain name and build a simple index page merging all of the services to form a cohesive and branded site.
In my opinion, the band website builders, bandzoogle etc offer a mediocre intermediate solution and are really more of a stopgap solution. They don't offer the power of a fully customizable and open solution like Drupal, yet they don't really excel at providing a specific service like the aforementioned service sites. And they cost money.
That being said, I'd love to hear from somebody with positive experiences with the band builder type sites.