Oct 29 BPMstr Week 3 Update: My Website Pains

Three Weeks Since my EDM Website Went up: Staying Busy

So, my website about Electronic Dance Music is up and people can go there… that is, if I gave them a business card. Other than that, no one will know that I am an aspiring EDM producer. What now? Well, I have 2 choices: I can do nothing (like so many talented EDM producers do!) and hope that God will help me get Google rankings because I am cool, or I can roll up my sleeves and understand the inner workings of the worldwide web. I chose the second method….

My EDM Website Requirements

So, where am I today? The first two days of the last week were spent ‘recovering’ from ADE 2012 (click to see ADE posts, including a couple of videos). And the next five days I dedicated to building more content and pages on my WordPress site and understanding how to set up my website to become what I call sociable. Namely, my website needs easy to find on the web to allow all users to do the following:

1. browse through different categories of content easily (which is tricky because I want to run 2 blogs on BPMstr.com – my personal blog and EDM Network Blog (NOV 17 update: I now decided to run the second blog on a separate website – TuneDome.com – check it out!);
2. like and Google-plus my posts and pages;
3. easily find and go to my third-party social networks;
4. quickly become members by either subscribing onto a newslist or by logging in securely through a social network of their choice (Google and Facebook, and MSN).

This is not a long list, but my research shows that my WordPress site requires a ton of plugins and customization to achieve that. Specifically, I decided to use the following WordPress plugins:

1. SocialRing Plugin – for integrating the social buttons into my content;
2. NextScripts Plugin – to post from my website automatically to social networks;
3. Broken Link Checker Plugin – for finding old or mistyped links in my content;
4. Easy Contact Forms Plugin – to allow users to contact me with feedback/ideas;
5. Page-List Plugin – to create a public sitemap of my site (good for navigation);
6. WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast – for optimizing the structure of my content for search engines (called search engine optimization).

The list above is a “product” of at least 30 hours of extensive testing of a variety of similar plugins in each plugin category. Now, when I say “testing” here, I don’t mean testing HOW they work – so far I was just testing whether they are functional after I install them. Remember, I am not a web developer; so when stuff doesn’t look right once it is installed, I can’t fix it – I must uninstall it and then try something else, unless code changes are insignificant.

But next, of course, while doing my research, I understood that many of these plugins are impossible to test without having valid social networks. Which was a setback… but wasn’t a surprise. So, I went ahead and set up the following social networks (click this to see all the social networks I set up – the list grew since this article was posted):

1. Google Plus Page for BPMstr
2. Personal Facebook account (believe it or not, I didn’t have one)
3. BPMstr Facebook Fan Page for me as
4. TuneDome EDM Network Facebook Fan Page
5. BPMstr Twitter account
6. TuneDome Twitter account for TuneDome EDM Network:

At the end of the day… or I should say at the end of the week, I have achieved a lot but still have a pile of work before my website start talking to my social networks.

Next Week: Make my Electronic Dance Music Website Work!

So, in order to be cool like Skrillex or like David Guetta or Deadmau5, I need to do a few things next week (it is not long, but by now I know a thing or two about building a website, and this short list will consume a vast amount of time – at least 80 hours):

1. Test all my WordPress plugins with all my social networks
2. Learn how to manage my artwork to make images smaller to increase browsing speed
3. Test my website in all these browsers: PC – IE, FireFox and Chrome | Mac – FireFox, Chrome and Safari

A handful, eh? Stay tuned. And please help spread the word about this site and about my progress – click a the bloody social link on my homepage. And remember to register on this site… and hope that the social login works (Oct 30 update: works like a charm!) to get my updates, participate, and to win an iPad (we are giving away 6 free iPads in random drawings!).

BPMstr | The Artist of the Tempo