Getting Started with Wired Musician

If you're ready to contact us about an estimate, please read these guidelines first. They'll help you to give us accurate information so that we can give you an accurate price.

In the first section below are several questions about you and your situation that we'll need answers to in order to give you an accurate estimate. The second section offers some important advice on what preparations you need to make before starting this project. Making these preparations will help to ensure that the project goes as quickly and smoothly as possible.

Questions About You and Your New Website

• Who are you?

  Are you an individual conductor, performer or composer, or an organization/ensemble?

• Do you already have a website?

  Do you want us to move your existing website into the Wired Musician system, or do you want a new website designed from scratch?

• Number of works?

  If you're a composer, how many works will we be posting to your website?

  (Performers do not need to provide this information, as rep list pages are usually just entered as a single page of text.)

• Number of performances?

  How many performances will we be posting to your website? If you want past performances listed as well as upcoming, make sure the number you give us includes both.

• Number of reviews or articles?

  Many clients like to place excerpts from reviews on their site, with links to the complete article in an Adobe Acrobat file (either scanned or retyped from the original). Within this number, offer a breakdown of how many will include such links, and whether you will be providing the Adobe Acrobat files or if we will need to generate these for you.

• How many items in your discography?

  If you will be including a discography page, how many recordings will be posted there? Generally we also include images of the CD cover. Will you be providing these images (usually in jpg format), or will you be sending us the CDs to scan them?

• How many sound files?

  Will you want to include sound files on your website, and if so, will you provide them to us in a web-ready format (MP3) or will we be creating these for you?

• What else goes on your website?

  What other kinds of information will you want to include on your website besides performances, works (repertoire), bio, etc?

When you see the words Tech Tip! below it means we're providing you with a technical tip that will help things go more quickly.

Preparations For This Project

• Determine your budget

  Obviously you need to have some idea what you're able to spend on the design, keeping in mind that there will be other expenses as well — hosting fees, updates, and so on. A minimum amount for a simple website design will be in the range of $200. But if the designer is also going to implement your site (create all the individual pages for you), that fee will increase depending, usually, on the number of pages.

• Be ready with your ideas and content

  So many clients come to Wired Musician with one question on their lips: "How fast can you get my new website up and running?" Inevitably the question isn't how fast the designer can do this, but rather how fast YOU can do it. Most people underestimate how much work getting a new website designed and implemented is going to be for themselves, never mind the designer.

  You need to have the following things ready before you begin this project:

  • Your design ideas

    Build up a list of 4 or 5 websites that you like for various reasons — the color scheme, the way graphics are incorporated into the design, whatever it might be — and provide these to the designer with an explanation for each.

    Do you want multiple layouts? For example, do you want a splash page that is unique on the site, and then a primary layout that will be common to all other pages?

    We're happy to do this for you, but Wired Musician regards splash pages as unnecessary and recommends against them. They increase your costs and add little to the effectiveness of the site.

    Multiple layouts might be desireable, however, if you want a particular part of your website to look dramatically different from the rest of it. Expect each layout to add about 50% of the cost of a single design.

  • Your photographs, Logo, Marketing Materials

    More than anything, the photographs and other visual materials you want on your website will suggest design elements and color schemes to a good designer, so have them ready either in print form, or scanned into image files.

    If you're an ensemble or other organization, provide the designer with a good, high-resolution version of your logo, if you have one, as well as your marketing materials, especially if they use a particular color scheme or other design elements you'd like the website to use as well.

    Tech Tip! When delivering these materials to the designer in an electronic format, make sure these files are as high a resolution as possible. Photos should be delivered in a "jpg" format (pronounced "jay-peg"). Logos and other graphics can be in any number of different formats, but the most common high-resolution types are "eps" files (say the letters in this case, "e-p-s") or "tiff" files (say "tiff").

    Very high-resolution photo and graphics files can be extremely large, sometimes many megabytes, and you should not send them as E-mail attachments — you might shut down your designer's mail server, and that's never a good way to start a new relationship. The designer may ask you to burn the files onto a CD and send it to him, or upload them to a remote server.

    If you only have prints of your photographs, there are a couple of options:

    • Take your prints to an office supply chain such as Kinko's, Staples or Office Max. They will scan them for you and put them on a CD (while they're at it, have them make a copy of the CD for you as well).

    • Send the prints to the designer, who will scan them for you. Ask first, however, what he will charge for this service.

  • Your Content

    A designer is dead in the water without the text you want to appear on your website. You need to have your bio, list of works or repertoire, performances, reviews, discography — and anything else you want on your site — updated and ready.

    Tech Tip! Many people provide their text content in word processor documents that have been heavily formatted: bold text, colors, borders, everything tabbed out into columns. This is generally more work for the designer, rather than less, since all of this has to be stripped out before it can be converted to HTML and placed on your site. In general try to deliver your content as plain text.

    Tech Tip! When delivering tabular data to a designer (such as a list of works with the title in one column, the year in the next, the duration in the next, etc), use your word processor's table function (they all have one) rather than just tabs. This will convert to HTML much more easily later on.

For sales and other general questions:
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To reach us by phone:	Call 215-589-3191 between 9 am and 6 pm Eastern Time, Monday through Friday.

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