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Awesome Intern Required

David — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 15:23:32 +0000

Good Lizard Media are looking for a new intern to come and work with us, one or two days a week.

Passionate about music and all things digital, the ideal person will understand the ins and outs of Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, and be familiar with the ups and downs of Soundcloud, HTML, and YouTube. A basic knowledge of foosball is essential. Does this sound like you? If it does – email your CV with a 140 character reason why you should come and work with us to jobs@goodlizardmedia.com

Basic HTML You Really Should Know

Pete — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 12:23:29 +0000

While you may not be interested in becoming the world’s best web designer, whether you’re an artist, a manager or a label, you or someone within your organisation should have some basic HTML skills. HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is what is known as a markup language. It consists of various ‘tags’ that are used to ‘describe’ the contents of a web page, which tell the web browser how to present that content to the user.

In this blog post, we’re going to look at some of the basic HTML tags that will allow you to create online content that you might normally ask for help to achieve.

Links

We’re all familiar with links. They are fundamental to the way the web works. They allow the users of a web site to navigate between pages, sections of pages or to external web sites. The markup for a link looks like this:

<a href="about-me.html">About Me</a>

Let’s break that down:

Firstly, we have the opening and closing ‘a’ tags:

<a> ... </a>

Secondly, we have the href attribute. This specifies the destination of the link. The word ‘attribute’ is important; It gives the browser information that is related to the tag. For that reason, it sits within the tag itself:

<a href="about-me.html"> ... </a>

Finally,we have the text between the opening and closing tags. This is the text that is actually displayed on the page for the user to click on. That’s it! Simple, right?

<a href="about-me.html">About Me</a>

Images

Links are great and all, but the web would be a pretty dull place if it consisted only of pages and pages of text. Thankfully, the modern web browser is capable of displaying all kinds of rich media, the most common being the humble image. Images can be used in many, many ways, but the basics are always the same. The markup for an image looks like this:

<img src="my-image.jpg" alt="Photo of me" width="250" height="120" />

Let’s take a closer look:

Firstly, we have our tag. You’ll notice that this differs slightly from the tag in the previous example. With the tag, we had an opening tag () and a closing tag (). This was because we needed to display the link text (“About Me”) between the two tags. However, with the tag, we don’t need to display any text, so we instead use a ‘self-closing’ tag:

<img />

Next, we need to add some attributes to the tag to tell the browser what to display and how to display it. The first, and most important, attribute is the src attribute. This is where we put the URL/location of the image itself. This can either be relative or absolute. “What does that mean?”, I hear you ask. Well, a relative URL is the location of the image relative to the current web page. So if the image is in the same folder as the current web page, you would simply enter the filename of the image:

<img src="my-image.jpg" />

If the image was stored in a sub-folder, it might look something like this:

<img src="images/my-image.jpg" />

An absolute URL is the complete URL of the image. You would use this method if the image was hosted on some other server/website:

<img src="http://www.another-website.com/my-image.jpg" />

The next attribute is the alt attribute. This is the text that you want to display if the image can’t be displayed for some reason (maybe the image file is missing or the user has decided to turn off images in their browser). This should be something meaningful that actually describes what the user would have seen if the image had loaded:

<img src="my-image.jpg" alt="Photo of me" />

Finally,we need to tell the browser the width and height of the image (in pixels). While most browsers will display the image at the correct size even if the width and height attributes are omitted, it’s good practice to always include them:

<img src="my-image.jpg" alt="Photo of me" width="250" height="120" />

Image Links

So we can create links and we can create images. What about creating images that are links themselves? If you’ve read and understood everything so far, this should be a walk in the park. Quite simply, all we need to do is replace the link text between the opening and closing tags with our image tag:

<a href="about-me.html">
     <img src="my-image.jpg" alt="Photo of me" width="250" height="120" />
</a>

When a user clicks on the image, they will be taken to the URL within the href attribute of the tag.

Paragraphs and Line Breaks

Most web pages contain a fair amount of text. Just like with printed text, we need to present that text in a way that makes it easy for the user to read it. Among other things, this means breaking up the text into manageable blocks, or paragraphs. HTML makes it really easy to break our text into paragraphs:

<p>My Name is Pete and I like HTML</p>
<p>I like HTML because it allows me to create attractive and user friendly web pages to show off my content</p>

By default, most web browsers will separate paragraphs by inserting a space between each of them equal to one line of text.

Sometimes, you may want to start a new line of text without ending the current paragraph and starting a new one. HTML has a tag for this too. It’s called a line break and it looks like this:

<br />

You’ll notice that, just like the tag, the line break tag is a self-closing tag (because it doesn’t contain any content). A line break is similar to hitting the return key on your keyboard when typing in a standard desktop word processor. It will not create a paragraph space like the

…

tags.

The line break tag should be used sparingly. If you use line breaks to create all kinds of desired layout effects, your HTML markup will very quickly become messy and bloated. Layout effects should be created with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), but that’s a tutorial for another time!

This is all great, but how can I try these tags out for real?

The great thing about HTML is that it is understood by your web browser. You don’t need a fancy web server to play around with it. So, I’ve included here a basic HTML template that you can use to create a web page for sharpening your HTML skills.


"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>My HTML Template</title>
</head>
<body>
 
 
 
</body>
</html>

Copy and paste this code into a plain text editor (e.g. Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac OS X) and save the file as test.html (actually, you can call the file whatever you want, so long as it ends with .html). Then, experiment by adding your own HTML tags between the … tags.

To see what your creation looks like, simply open test.html and it should automatically open in your default web browser.

If you’d like to learn more about HTML, there are some great tutorials on the W3 Schools website.

5 Easy Ways for Musicians To Optimise Their Time Online

David — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 15:38:36 +0000

1 – Use time away from the internet to prepare content, ideas and updates.

One of the common complaints I hear from artists when asked to post more regularly online is that they can’t think of anything interesting to write. The truth is that nothing interesting really occurs when you are sitting at a computer. Instead take a notepad and pen, write yourself text messages, smart phone notes or use a dictaphone to get those interesting anecdotes/stories/ideas down as and when they happen. Then, when back at a computer, there will be lots of jumping off points for content.

2 – Get some help.

This may seem obvious but to speed up your time online delegate as much of your grunt work in updating as possible. This involves finding a friend, fan, manager or ‘web guy’ to take the responsibility of preparing content such as resizing photos, uploading tracks to Soundcloud, changing banners on MySpace etc. These sorts of tasks are simple but time-consuming and don’t need to be done by the artist. This frees up time online for you to use communicating.

3 – Use different media.

Visitors to an artist’s social networks and website are looking for new information and content. This is the main reason that they come back regularly to your pages. By using photos, video, drawings, blog posts, top 10s, interviews, press coverage, music recommendations, competitions and questions it’s much easier to keep excited and interested in the content you are making. Rather than sitting down and doing written blog post after blog post, consider mixing things up more and you’ll find it much more interesting and ultimately easier to do updates.

4 – Plan out content from bulk.

Getting time and access to a computer can be difficult for touring artists or musicians who also hold down jobs in amongst rehearsals and writing and all the other tasks that have to be done. As in points 1 and 3, there are various ways to come up with content and differing types to use. When you do have time to create content , try to plan out when it is going to be used rather than posting as soon as its created. Look at using a scheduling tool in a CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress or social network tools like Socialoomph to spread out the content you create over a period of a few weeks. This decreases the amount of times you need to access the internet and also reduces the stress of constantly coming up with and posting new content.

5 – Take tips from professional bloggers.

Blogging is a profession and income generator for many people across the world, spending their time creating engaging content that brings people to their site regularly. Namely but not limited to the following:

Guest Posts – Asking other musicians, members of your team, fans and journalists to write a guest post for your website or facebook page. This could be opinion pieces, fan history of your music, a ‘day in the life of’ your roadie or manager, the band you recently toured with’s memories of some gigs, etc.

Encourage readers to share – use a service like addthis.com to quickly add the ability to share the content on the reader’s own social network profile or blog.

Comment and engage with other blogs – Posting comments on other blogs and engaging within communities such as drownedinsound.com or last.fm to eventually generate interest in your own content.

The Digital Learning Circle

Pete — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 07:00:05 +0000

Whenever we decide to develop a new skill, there’s a learning curve. When that learning curve is steep, we can sometimes become demoralised and end up giving up altogether.

Although ‘digital music’ has been around for a while now, it’s still new enough that the landscape and the tools we use to navigate it are constantly changing. It’s all too easy to look at this situation and think, “I’m never going to keep up with this, so why bother?”.

The important thing to realise is that there’s no point trying to reach the top of that curve because, by the time you get there, it will have moved. Instead, think of it as a learning circle. An endless circle that will allow you to never run out of new skills to master. Forget about trying to satisfy that need inside of you to reach an ‘end goal’ and get excited about everything there is out there to learn!

Of course, no one can possibly learn everything. If you tried, you’d very quickly start getting that sinking feeling again. So the trick is to first ask yourself, “What skill would be most useful to me right now?”. Then focus all your energy on learning that one skill. When you’ve finished learning that skill, ask yourself again, “What skill would be most useful to me right now?”. It’s important that you ask yourself this question every time, because your priorities may have changed since last time. Something that you thought was important three months ago may be completely useless now.

So what skill would be most useful to you right now? Maybe you’d like to learn some HTML so you know how to embed images, create links or even build simple web pages. Maybe some Photoshop basics would be useful so you can create your own banner ads or even design the artwork for your next album. Maybe you’d like to learn how to use WordPress to build yourself a shiny new website. Whatever it is, ignore all the people telling you “you need to know x, y and z or you’re no good”. Pick your skill and master it!

Broken Windows In A Super Club

David — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 12:53:24 +0000

There is a new Superclub in town with a 10,000 capacity. Most of the clientèle are single and looking for someone to hook up with. You always used to just go out to the pub in town and see a small crowd of single people, which everyone was happy with, and the only people who ever got to be known by thousands of single people were celebrities, so this is something completely new.

With this new superclub, the opportunities to meet lots of single people have never been greater but there has also never been so much competition. (I hope it’s obvious that this alludes to digital promotion. Otherwise this will be a very confusing few paragraphs.)

The club will be filled with thousands of other people similar to you and in order to be successful and attract attention there, you cannot rely upon the luxury of having plenty of time to build relationships, afforded to you by small and therefore less competitive groups. Critical to initial success, therefore, is the ability to display yourself through appearance and in short bouts of conversation that are both equal to or above that of those that surround you. If there are ten people all of similar intelligence, looks and interests, it becomes the smaller details that differentiate you. Anything from unshined shoes to unkempt hair can mean the difference between sparking conversations and interest in yourself and being left sipping a beer by the fire exit.

Building relationships doesn’t occur on the first night you meet people at the Superclub though does it? First you meet people and talk briefly and get on, hopefully being memorable enough to then pick up and carry on the conversation next time, meeting as people return to the club regularly and remember you and then moving on to meeting away from the Superclub, eventually building a relationship through the greater understanding developed over time.

This is a pretty elaborate way of explaining the application to music of a theory from the brilliant “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell called ‘Broken Windows’, which he uses as part of his dissection of what fuels epidemics and explosions of popularity. The Broken Windows theory was first suggested in explanation of the sudden drop in crime in New York in the 1990s by James Q.Wilson and George Kelling,

“If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no-one cares and that non-one is in charge”

Despite there being a large police force, a democratic political system, laws and courts protecting people and society, a few broken windows can give the overall impression that no one cares and no one is in charge. This relates to the marketing of music directly, as it reminds us that, as the internet creates a ‘superclub’ of both large scale audiences and large numbers of performers, it is the smaller things that make a major difference in the success or failure of obtaining the relationships with fans that will create a career.

First and foremost remember that what is most important is that the web presence represents the artist as strongly as possible in image and message, then ensuring that there are no ‘broken windows’; the information is up-to-date, communication is replied to and care is taken in any and all forms of expression including design.

Ensuring that the presentation of an artist online is as professional, tidy and accessible as possible does not mean you will successfully create thousands of relationships. It does, however, give you the best chance of being afforded the opportunity of beginning the conversation in a crowded marketplace.

A guide to submitting singles for review

David — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:10:00 +0000

We’ve talked on this blog before about doing your own digital pr, getting music out to blogs and websites for reviews and features. Yesterday Wendy Roby who writes the ace singles review section for Drowned In Sound (www.drownedinsound.com) posted on her tumblr a guide to how to submit your music to her for review.

I highly recommend reading it even if you haven’t thought of sending a single to Drowned In Sound before http://wendyroby.tumblr.com/Singles

The general take-aways from the blog are as follows:

Only send music to websites/blogs who cover the music that you make. If you play in an awesome crossover metal band send your music to Thrash Hits, not Drowned In Sound or resident advisor (www.residentadvisor.net – electronic music). It’s a waste of both your time and that of the person you’ve sent it too.

Make your email is easy to both understand and also to search for in an inbox. Include release dates, label name and a short description of the band.

Include an mp3 if it’s a single review both as a download/attachment that the reviewer can put on their mp3 player but also as a youtube video or in a soundcloud player (www.soundcloud.com) so they can embed it as part of a review or news item etc.

Check out the article and drop any comments you have on success’s and failures you’ve had with doing ‘pr’ in the past below.

Get Your Numbers Up

David — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 11:02:51 +0000

A common request from labels, managers and artists is that we “need to get the numbers up on our social networks”. In essence, although not necessarily intentionally, this can be translated to mean “we need to be able to spam as many people as possible about product x in order for a small percentage to buy”. The thinking behind this is “the greater the numbers we have, the greater the small percentage that buy will amount to”.

If you were running a small sewing shop on a high street and a generous investor gave you the time and resources to market your shop, would you spend this on getting more people to walk past your store? As this is essentially what you are doing when you focus on numbers, and specifically the wrong numbers, to plan and analyse your ‘promotion’.

So let’s look briefly at Twitter and the ‘numbers’ there that really count:

Retweets
@replies
Link Clicks
Followers

Not necessarily in that order but definitely with follower numbers at the very end. The reason for using Twitter as an artist is to engage with people. Ultimately, the success of this can be measured by the amount of conversation you create, i.e. re-tweets and @replies to your account and, from a slightly more commercial angle, link clicks.

Concentrating on keeping an engaging, interesting and entertaining profile that generates lots of interest is far more valuable than increasing followers. The power of conversion is ultimately greater than the perceived value of promotion.

Organic Search Engine Optimization: Part 3

Pete — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 07:00:02 +0000

This is a guest post by Bart Schelfhout of Boza Solutions, a web and software development company with offices in Belgium and London.

So far in Part 1 and Part 2, we’ve looked at what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) actually is, we’ve examined the differences between organic and paid search results, we’ve looked at optimizing your website’s pages, indexing/sitemaps, keywords, meta descriptions and inbound links. If you haven’t already, make sure you read Part 1 and Part 2 before reading this post.

As mentioned before, the algorithm used by Google is constantly changing and includes many unknown factors (most recently the load speed of a page is starting to affect ranking as well, encouraging developers to reduce the load time as much as possible). I will now list some unconventional techniques for trying to increase your site’s Google Search Engine Result page ranking or visitor number.

Where previously it used to take a huge amount of keywords in the header (some being completely irrelevant to the actually content of the site) to get loads of traffic to your site, things have become more complex. As search engines have evolved since the start of the internet, they have also become more intelligent, making it almost impossible to get irrelevant traffic to your website. At present unauthorised techniques, or Black Hat SEO, can even get your site penalised, making it totally disappear from any Search Engine Results Page (In the SEO world referred to as SERP).

A few examples of black Hat SEO techniques are spamdexing, link farming or keyword stuffing.

Spamdexing is a technique where you create pages especially for search engines, in an attempt to get a higher ranking for a particular key word phrase. It is a reverse engineering trick where the webmaster thinks of key words and phrases a user might input into a search engine and try to build his page to include as many of those keyword phrases in the content as possible.

Keyword stuffing is similar to spamdexing, where a webmaster puts as many related keywords as possible onto a page, but where he doesn’t care how the page looks like and the main objective is to either redirect to an affiliate or to click on a sponsored ad.

Link farming is a group of websites where every website in the group links to every other website in that group, thus spamming the index of a search engine. However, when the linking is done from sites that are relevant to each other it is not considered a black hat technique.

Another definite don’t do is hiding texts or having titles shown in the same colour as the background (because title tags are more likely to get picked up by search engines as keywords).

Improving your Organic Search Engine ranking is something that takes more time compared to the paid Search Engine inclusion and is something that is influenced by not just one factor (highest bid per keyword click) but by a whole group of factors combined into the search engine algorithm. Do not expect your changes to have an overnight effect! Not all of the factors of the search engine algorithm are known and the importance of each factor varies.

The key to getting as high as possible for search terms RELATIVE to your site’s content is CONSTANT revision and monitoring using monitoring tools such as Google Analytics. Once you reach a high ranking, don’t believe you can sit on your laurels. Organic Search Engine Optimization is an ONGOING process!

Organic Search Engine Optimization: Part 2

Pete — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 07:00:43 +0000

This is a guest post by Bart Schelfhout of Boza Solutions, a web and software development company with offices in Belgium and London.

In Part 1, we looked at what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) actually is, we examined the differences between organic and paid search results and we looked at how to make sure the pages of your website are optimized. If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, do that first.

Now you think your site structure is acceptable, how do you get the indexing by a search engine started? The best way for this is to create a Google webmaster account (this is really easy if you already have a Gmail account) and register your website through the webmaster tools by placing a verification code in your website header. The webmaster tool will allow you to upload an XML sitemap into the system, helping your site to get indexed faster and easier. There are plenty of sites where you can enter your URL and those sites will create the XML sitemap. I’ve found that http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ works quite well.

In the Google webmaster tools you will also find a section for inserting / creating a robot.txt file. In this file you can specify which folders should be accessed by the search engine spider. Say you have a folder containing some images that you use for your website layout. The last thing you want is to have these images show up in a Google image search. That’s why you should protect this folder and disallow the spider access to it.

Now you know the structure of your site is good, but for which keywords and/or keyword phrases do you want to appear on the SERPs?

I found it best to always select a primary and secondary keyword phrase, and make sure these appear in the meta tags (keyword and description), page copy, title tags and file name / URL as much as possible. Remember, the higher in the page that your keyword phrases occur in your body text, the better.

In your HTML header section, you have the possibility to insert a meta-description and keywords. The meta-description has to describe in short what the visitor can find on this page. This will be displayed under the link on the SERP (see figure 1) and ideally should not contain over 160 characters. Make sure the primary and secondary keyword phrases are present in this description. In the keyword section you can enter as many keywords as desired, separated by commas, but ideally you do not want more than 7-8 keyword phrases in there. Make sure each page has a different set of keyword phrases and meta-descriptions, as each page clearly contains different information.

Figure 1: Meta description

Another effective step to directing relevant traffic to your site is linking. Having other websites with topics relevant to yours link to your website does half the work for you. Why? Simple, you already know that these visitors are relevant (they are coming from a site with a relevant topic remember?), thus increasing the chance for a goal conversion (either selling a product through your website or having people complete a contact form) dramatically. Having other sites link to your site also increases your ranking on the Search Engine Results Page, as your site will be associated with the keyword phrases displayed on the website linking to your site. Careful, make sure the link displays on relevant topic pages. If the Google spider decides this is not the case, this might negatively affect your ranking or might even result in your website not appearing at all in the search results (more on that later).

That’s it for Part 2. In Part 3, we’ll be looking at some of the more unconventional techniques for increasing your search ranking.

Organic Search Engine Optimization: Part 1

Pete — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 13:04:20 +0000

This is a guest post by Bart Schelfhout of Boza Solutions, a web and software development company with offices in Belgium and London.

In this blog I will focus over the course of the coming weeks on increasing traffic coming from search engines, and then more precisely the traffic coming from organic Search Engine Results Pages (or SERP). I will try to shed some light onto how to easily improve your Organic Search Results Ranking, the process also known as Organic SEO. Did I lose you already? No worries, let’s just start from the top.

What is SEO? Wikipedia tells us the following about Organic SEO:

“the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion.”

Figure 1: Search Engine Market Share

Ok, unpaid search results, that sounds good. Now which search engine should I optimize for? Which ones are available on the market and does my target market play a role in this? The figure on the right gives you a good idea of the key players in the Search Engine market. Agreed, if you live in the UK you might be thinking to yourself “AOL…yeah right!”, but if you wish to target the US market as well, then the relevance of AOL certainly comes into play. Concentrating on the UK market here, it is fair to say that Google is the main player, so I will focus my attention on that particular search engine.

Now, when I do a search in Google, I get a page with many different sections. Which section am I aiming to get top rankings in? What is Paid search and what is Organic? In figure 2, organic search is shown in the green colour, and makes up the largest area in the search results. The other areas are called “Sponsored links” and the rankings are determined by bidding on keywords.

Figure 2: Organic vs. Paid Search Results

So what influences the ranking of your website for a certain search term? Google has never disclosed any exact algorithm that is used to prevent incorrect use of it, but besides tips listed hereunder, I would say the key in all of this is RELEVANCY.

A first step in achieving SEO is actually tracking your site performance. To do this, register on Google and go to the Analytics section to register your site. You will be asked to place some tracking code in your website, so you will need access to your website code. This tracking will make it possible to analyse your site and see where your visitors come from and through which source (direct, referring site or through a search engine).

Now then, let’s see some factors that influence the ranking of your site and how to optimise those.

A good starting point in my opinion is always to make sure your (X)HTML structure is good. This starts with validating your pages (not just the home page!) and CSS file. This can easily be done by using an online tool for XHTML or CSS validating. A quick search gave me this as a place where I can do this http://validator.w3.org/. Validation can for instance tell you if you have an image in your site that does not have the ‘alt’ property set. A meaningful ‘alt’ and ‘title’ property on an image can aid your image in showing up in the Google image search results.

A validated XHTML file doesn’t necessarily mean its structure is correct. Make sure each page has a different title and make sure that the title is relevant to what that page displays. A proper header hierarchy is also a must (only 1

tag, following tags have to be h2 and subsections of that h3 etc).

Figure 3: Proper header hierarchy

Good formed links always improves the visitor experience and affects search engine spiders in a positive way. The same can be said for the URL’s to your pages. A lot of dynamic sites might use a URL structure such as http://www.example.com/index.php?pageid=8. Unfortunately this URL does not give the visitor any information on what he/she might find at this location. It is better to use user friendly URL’s such as http://www.example.com/what-we-do.php, where the URL clearly indicates what that page will be about. The trend is to replace any spaces in the URL name by dashes.

Ok, that’s it for today. In the next installment, we’ll be looking at how to get your pages indexed by the search engines and how to get your keywords right.