Modern Web CMS Tech

arty

arty

arty

Soldato
Joined
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Stamford
I've agreed to help build a new website for a couple of musician friends. I used to do loads of website stuff, but I'm a bit out of touch with the technology, so I was wondering what sort of things people would recommend looking at now?

A few pertinent points:

- My friends are very non-technical, but need to be responsible for maintaining content (text, images, video, sound files, gig dates etc.).
- I am happy to manage the more technical stuff, including layout and design, maintenance, updates etc.
- It needs to be relatively cheap to host, so probably nothing too exotic or weird, though I'm totally happy to learrn new skills in order to put this together.

My most recent experience was using NextJS with Sanity headless CMS, publishing to Netlify. This works fairly well, but I've gone off NextJS and React in general, so I'd prefer to avoid it this time round. Prior to that I have had some experience with Wordpress, Contentful, built loads of sites in Rails, and also done loads of bespoke CMS work in various languages (PHP, .net, Ruby, Node, the list goes on).

My friends have been using Wix, but the results have been pretty poor, and the platform is expensive for what they want. They have been recommended Squarespace, and I suggested that they look at Wordpress, but I thought I'd ask on here in case anyone has some hot tips for nice platforms to look at? I'm happy enough to do the legwork on design, so the templating stuff you get with those probably isn't required.

Back in the day, it was all about the server CMS platforms (e.g. Drupal, Joomla etc.), and I assume they're still around now? I'd really like to avoid all the heavy JS stuff as I find it pretty unenjoyable to work with :) My preference would be a nice server-side language serving static pages with a light sprinkling of JS where needed. I'm interested in HTMX and similar frameworks in order to facilitate this, but I don't have any practical experience with them.

Thoughts and ideas most welcome! Thanks :D
 
I would recommend avoiding Wordpress. It's a constant treadmill of security vulnerabilities, and frankly just not a good piece of software. Squarespace has a good reputation but I've not tried it.
 
Mr Jack said:
I would recommend avoiding Wordpress. It's a constant treadmill of security vulnerabilities, and frankly just not a good piece of software. Squarespace has a good reputation but I've not tried it.
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That's more or less what I remember from working with Wordpress ages ago :p

Squarespace looks okay, but is probably too expensive for them. I'm now looking at Astro and Svelte, but I suspect that they might be a bit heavy for what we want.
 
Personally, and given what the type of website, i would opt for a static site generator like Hugo and get Cloudflare to serve it all. But it'll require some learning so because of that, another vote for Wix/Squarespace as non-techy folk will need to update it and it'll save some headaches with maintenance.

Alternatively if cost is an issue (with Wix/Squarespace) then you could look at CMS' like Automad or Bludit, both are flat file type and lightweight but again there may be a bit of learning required for those that need to update content.

Otherwise Drupal or Wordpress but Wordpress is a bloated mess these days and you really need to be on it for maintenance/security; Drupal is definitely the better of the two and it's certainly better at serving content but, it's still a bit of sledgehammer for what is essentially a basic static website.
 
Thanks for replies, all!

Tee Hee Johnson said:
Love for Umbraco here, C# based. Lots of the complexities are hidden from the site managers.

Can be done open source (self hosted) or via hosting from them.
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I think Umbraco and .net is probably a bit too heavy for this, but thanks for the suggestion as I'd forgotten about it (not worked with it for years) :)

visibleman said:
Personally, and given what the type of website, i would opt for a static site generator like Hugo and get Cloudflare to serve it all. But it'll require some learning so because of that, another vote for Wix/Squarespace as non-techy folk will need to update it and it'll save some headaches with maintenance.
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Hugo looks pretty good actually, though I'd probably need to use it with a headless CMS for them to manage the content. Definitely one for the list! :D

visibleman said:
Alternatively if cost is an issue (with Wix/Squarespace) then you could look at CMS' like Automad or Bludit, both are flat file type and lightweight but again there may be a bit of learning required for those that need to update content.
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I like the look of both of those, and PHP web hosting can be pretty cheap, so thanks, they're also on the list :)

visibleman said:
Otherwise Drupal or Wordpress but Wordpress is a bloated mess these days and you really need to be on it for maintenance/security; Drupal is definitely the better of the two and it's certainly better at serving content but, it's still a bit of sledgehammer for what is essentially a basic static website.
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Yeah, I came to similar conclusions when I was looking at these over the weekend.

radderfire said:
For free? Just wondering.

Could they not just have a web presence on Spotify?
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No, the domain name is already out there in publicity material, so it needs to be a proper website rather than just something in Spotify. They also want to sell music through it.
 
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arty said:
No, the domain name is already out there in publicity material, so it needs to be a proper website rather than just something in Spotify. They also want to sell music through it.
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You can forward the domain to the Spotify page. What I was thinking is that Spotify might be more effective in terms of marketing because of the social element. I expect Spotify has somewhere you can post gig dates. No one is really looking at standalone websites anymore, they are all on social media. I don't visit any band websites, I'm on Spotify a lot.
 
radderfire said:
You can forward the domain to the Spotify page. What I was thinking is that Spotify might be more effective in terms of marketing because of the social element. I expect Spotify has somewhere you can post gig dates. No one is really looking at standalone websites anymore, they are all on social media. I don't visit any band websites, I'm on Spotify a lot.
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Not true - the first thing they're asked when sorting out gigs is 'do you have a website?' :) I also get asked about mine moderately often, as an independent musician (not that I have one at the moment!).

Either way, I'll look at Spotify, but I think relying on a rather dubious closed platform instead of the open web isn't really a sensible idea :p
 
arty said:
Not true - the first thing they're asked when sorting out gigs is 'do you have a website?' :) I also get asked about mine moderately often, as an independent musician (not that I have one at the moment!).

Either way, I'll look at Spotify, but I think relying on a rather dubious closed platform instead of the open web isn't really a sensible idea :p
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What I am saying is it's the discoverability online they need to focus on. They are more discoverable on Spotify and YouTube etc than a standalone website is, which to all intents and purposes, is undiscoverable online. When they are asked at a gig for their website, they can give out their url, but this is not the website being discovered online. That is not their web presence alone finding them more fans.
 
radderfire said:
What I am saying is it's the discoverability online they need to focus on. They are more discoverable on Spotify and YouTube etc than a standalone website is, which to all intents and purposes, is undiscoverable online. When they are asked at a gig for their website, they can give out their url, but this is not the website being discovered online. That is not their web presence alone finding them more fans.
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Okay, but most of their interest comes from word of mouth, people hearing them at gigs, and promoters (e.g. at festivals) booking them, all of whom want a web address. It is very unusual to get 'cold' leads from people who have seen something on the internet.

Having said all that, they're already on Spotify and Youtube, as well as the main social media platforms, so I think a standalone website will just enhance their presence rather than diminishing it :)
 
You didn't say whether you were doing this for free or not.

Yes, there is a place for a website. However, before you put in a lot of your time (possibly for free) building them a nice website with all the bells and whistles they want, what are their numbers so far on Spotify and YouTube like? If they are low, you are wasting your time building the website, because it won't get many visits. They should get their numbers up on social media first. If the numbers are low, just build them a basic website first and wait until they can prove they can get traffic to it.

Also, no-one buys music from a website any more, it's all streamed.

However, I appreciate you may just like to have a project.
 
I play with them from time to time, and this will just be a hobby project for me, so I won't be charging them. They're already fairly busy with gigs, and they are wanting to replace their existing website with something better. This will be a basic website, but they will need to maintain the gig list on there as their followers often want to see where and when they might be playing next, and I don't want to be constantly editing a page for them every time they get a new booking :p

They already get quite a few sales on Bandcamp, and often sell CDs at gigs. Lots of musician friends of mine have much the same experience; for instance, a fairly good local band I know has been experimenting with vinyl pressings recently, and they all sold out almost immediately. They were sold exclusively through their website ;)

The need for a website in this case isn't really up for debate, given that when their current (awful) site was down for a couple of days, the first they heard about it was an upcoming venue calling to complain that they had nothing to link to :p
 
radderfire said:
Also, no-one buys music from a website any more, it's all streamed.
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A lot of music is streamed but it's complete ******** and factually incorrect to say "no-one buys music from a website any more" given the increase in sales of music media (cds, vinyl predominantly) over the last handful of years (some source, source etc).
My credit card would also say something about that statement too :cry:

And a website is brand marketing 101. Whilst there are dedicated platforms for musicians like Supertape (Wix/Squarespace-esque), and it's perhaps worth @arty taking a look at them along with the music-specific 'link in bio' platforms like feature.fm or Tunelinx for their socials, they tend to be costly and even a decent single page website (basic info such as displaying tour/gig dates along with links back to socials/music distributors etc) will massively help the band and drive traffic around.
 
visibleman said:
And a website is brand marketing 101. Whilst there are dedicated platforms for musicians like Supertape (Wix/Squarespace-esque), and it's perhaps worth @arty taking a look at them along with the music-specific 'link in bio' platforms like feature.fm or Tunelinx for their socials, they tend to be costly and even a decent single page website (basic info such as displaying tour/gig dates along with links back to socials/music distributors etc) will massively help the band and drive traffic around.
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Thanks for mentioning those - Supertape and a few others actually look quite useful, so I'm investigating them now :)
 
visibleman said:
A lot of music is streamed but it's complete ******** and factually incorrect to say ...
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People buying music from websites will be utterly dwarfed by the stream volume.

The existence of a website alone won't massively help a band, working on the discoverability of the band could. Sure, have a website, but I'm saying put effort into the marketing before too much effort into the website. There's no point having an amazing website if no-one's looking at it, and a traditional website is not that discoverable, unlike having a good song on Spotify.
 
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radderfire said:
People buying music from websites will be utterly dwarfed by the stream volume.
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Not what you originally stated, plus physical media makes them money compared to streaming which is why musicians/bands will continue selling it.

Either way, Arty has mentioned a few times it's needed so there's no need to keep beating the dead horse/opinion and i'm sure, either way, we've all given him (and the band) plenty of food for thought :)
 
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visibleman said:
Either way, Arty has mentioned a few times it's needed so there's no need to keep beating the dead horse/opinion and i'm sure, either way, we've all given him (and the band) plenty of food for thought :)
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I think there is. It's his time, which he's providing for free. I am simply saying don't let someone waste your time asking for everything under the sun in a website unless it can be shown they can actually get traffic to the website. You can put a basic website in place and monitor traffic, and once you can see traffic, then do what's needed. He may not be worried about how long he has to work on it, in which case ok it's his time not mine.
 
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