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I am organizing a studio web page. I know there are many web hosting and design sites on the internet. Is there one you would recommend or any you suggest I stay away from? Better yet, is there a web hosting site designed specifically for Piano Studios?

My husband is a designer and programmer and he did my website. I've actually got a new design that just needs to be programmed in, but it works very well. Here are some pointers on what to look for and what to avoid:

Generally, if you want something custom, you will pay more for it. A custom website, well-done, can cost $1000 or more, assuming there's no e-commerce capabilities. You are basically paying for the custom design.

There are web templates out there that you can purchase for a few hundred dollars that are pre-designed. You pick the design up like best from what is available. However, you still have to find someone to program it for you (to make links work, etc.).

There are web hosting companies that will also do design & programming work for you as long as you sign up for hosting. Again, you will be limited with how many pages, functionality and the look of your site, but it is very economical.

Lastly, avoid hiring someone's friend's son who works out of their basement -- basically anyone who is not a professional. Generally people who go this route end up with something that doesn't work the way they intended, and don't get their website in a timely manner. My husband has so many people who come to him after having paid money and wasted a lot of time with someone who never delivered.

The ongoing costs for maintaining a website in addition to hosting are any website changes you wish to make and domain name registration. If you go with a cheaper option (non-custom) website, chances are there will be no capability for you to do updates. You will have to pay extra to have someone do this. Also, you usually have to pay to keep your domain each year or two years. There are cheaper and more expensive domain name registration companies out there, so shop around.

When you choose a domain name, first search to see if it's available on a site like this: http://instantdomainsearch.com/. Also consider the ease of relating this domain name to others on the phone by leaving out hyphens, underscores, etc.

Hope this helps!

On hosting I have used two different companies: hostfolio and bluehost. Hostfolio has always been reliable for the past 4 years and my website is hosted there (www.nikolas-sideris.com). I've had a downtime of less than 2 hours in total and their response time is great! Bluehost feels less 'personal' and downtime has been slightly more, but it offers a huge amount of features, that are hard to find at such low prices anywhere. In general with around 100$ per year you should be set for hosting.

For design, you should decide towards html or flash and then HIRE the right person, pay for it and feel secure that they will do the job right. Morodiene is perfectly right: These things (and any professional job) cannot be done from the basement of a house, or from the bedroom.

I've recently started using Wordpress. It's basically used for blogging, but can be adapted for a variety of uses and designs.

My blog is hosted by Godaddy and uses Wordpress:

www.pianoped.com

Wendy Stevens has a wonderful website, also done with Wordpress:

www.composecreate.com

Wordpress also offers hosting:

http://wordpress.com/

For music teachers, there's also Music Teachers Helper:

www.musicteachershelper.com

I use it for billing, scheduling, and recordkeeping, but they also offer studio webpages as part of their package. There's a free trial (that remains free if you only want to register a few students), or there are a variety of subscription options.

While website designs can cheap and easy (using something like iWeb or Wordpress), I would strongly suggest that you NOT opt for cheap or free hosting. Cheap/free hosting can be unreliable and litter your site with advertising.

Something else you may find useful is to find a bunch of sites you like and check the credits. Many designers will add a link to their services at the bottom of the sites they design. (Like at the bottom of Morodiene's site.)

I'd recommend trying the "Music Teacher Helper" first because of what it already allows you to do instantaneously - just fill in the blanks to your satisfation and because of the cost which is always an important factor.

As Kreisler said, you can use the site at no cost and experience what it can do for you.

Jason,

Congratulations on an excellent accomplishment: The Piano Pedagogy Page!

I'll be a reader for sure!

Thanks so much!

Betty

As always, thanks again.

I put together a website for my son’s club baseball team and found many hosting sights that made scheduling, emailing players and recording statistics easy. I knew there must something available for piano teaching.

I tried the Music Teacher Helper sight and was able to access the main page but the additional links are not working. I will try it again later.

My website, by the way, was done in Wordpress so I could do updates myself. It is quite easy to use for static sites.

What do you mean by static sites, please, Morodiene?

Oh, sorry! A static site is one that just has information to give, links you can click on to read more information. A dynamics site is one that can change, like an e-commerce site, or one that has various automatic updates (like a customer review portion, or current events or quotes that rotate depending on the day, etc.).

On the MTH site, I think you will have to register - you don't need to enter student names and such - but you will be able to view all the things teachers can see.

Hope that gains you access.

They also have a newsletter you can sign up for (monthly) that has articles posted by teachers and updates to the system.

Brandon Pierce is the developer and it's a very helpful site especially for those with larger studios and many people to communicate with. I know it's at least two years since I joined.

What is the site to be for? If it's just for making annoucements (recitals, stuff of general interest to you existing students), and the users will primarily be people who you already know, then it's possible that one of the many free blog sites will what you need. Some of them offer high degrees of customization and are easy to use because they're designed for non-experts. The problems with this approach are the limited ability to index stuff (most are just chronological order of posting), and that they don't usually show up in web searches, so they're not very good for attracting new business. But free is free, and this approach works OK for simple announcements.

The technological aspects of building are web site are relatively straightforward, and I imagine that most people could learn to do it in a few days, especially with guidance. But there are some subtleties around web browser compatibility, among other things, which take quite a lot of experience to get on top of. Without that experience it's easy to develop a site that looks great on your own computer, and horrible everywhere else.

When my own department doesn't have the developer time to put toward building our own customized webpages, we have purchased pre-made formats templates from WooThemes. They have several pre-made customized "ready to plug in your information" themes, each that has functionality already built into it.

Like this one for businesses:
WooThemes "Over Easy"

Or, if you plan to use social networking software (Facebook, Twitter) to engage your students in the studio, there's this one, which comes with those sites "pre-loaded" into the theme:
Therapy

Note - these do not include web hosting...this is just for the 'artistic' and 'functionality" design of the website itself. If one of these meets your need there is no reason at all to pay someone $$$$ to custom-build it from the ground up; in fact a lot of those places probably use templates like this anyway.

Looks like these thems templates run $70 with a buy-one-get-one free offer at the moment.

I have no interest in them I just happen to know that people that are in the business of putting educational content out on the internet consider their products good enough to use, cause I work for them

Hi everyone,

I am new here (in terms of posting), been lurking around for a while. (Love the forum by the way!). I am a piano teacher from Sydney, Australia.

Recently, I decided to make a website for my studio, first I tried one of them website site builder sites (I wasn't that happy with the result, it looked professional, but wasn't piano/music related), then I stumbled along one of the already made template sites.

I chose a design that I really liked, and just change the contents of the original design. You can choose a html, flash, easy flash, gallery type designs. I chose a easy flash type design. It took me about 4 days to edit/write the contents of my studio.

It is quite easy if you know basic html codes (to add links, make text bold, underline etc). I just googled basic html codes, and learnt from there.

Overall it cost me under $200 AUD to create a website that I really like - looks professional and music related!

$90 Template
$90 Website hosting (for one year), domain registration (two years)


Huy

I recently tried the Music Teachers Helper free website. It's very limiting in the types of links and amount of pictures you are allowed to post. But perhaps there would be more options if I were to pay monthly... Also it's been about 5 weeks and neither yahoo or google bring up my website when I search for keywords. I have to type in the entire address. But then, I'm not the most tech-savy person and may completely be missing something. Ideally I'd like to hire someone (professional) to just do the whole thing for me.

I use tripod.com for my own website, as well as our local MTAC website.

The cost is $8.95 per month and it includes the domain name.

You pick a template and just 'plug in' the info you want. It's easy and looks nice too. There are also options to customize your site.

Thank you everyone. I looked at Music Teacher Helper and I like the way it emails statements to students. I am still considering if I want the web sight as a marketing tool to perspective students or a source of information for current students. Thank you for all the ideas.

Here's a website company specializing in studio websites...looks interesting:

http://www.musicteaching.com/

Yay! My new design is done. Feel free to check it out.

Jessica, that looks really good. I have a website which uses template in a similar way. It's quite good but it has a silly name and it won't show up on a google search. At the moment it doesn't matter much because I only use it for information for current students but if I wanted to use it to attract new business I would have to do something else.

Does anyone know of downsides to this way of doing it?