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Promoting Your Band with the Garage Band Theme and WordPress

Garage Band is a feature-rich WordPress theme for showcasing musicians and their work. The theme gives you all the tools you need to create a beautiful website and promote your band.

After installing and activating Garage Band, you’ll find several new options in your WordPress admin menu.

The WordPress navigation with the Garageband menu items highlighted

This is a step-by-step guide to configuring the theme and filling your new website with content.

Tweaking the Design and Layout

First of all, you should customize the appearance. It’s important that your band website reflects the style of your music.

In your WordPress admin menu, open Theme Options. From here you can make numerous adjustments to the design and layout of your site, including:

  • Uploading a new logo and background image
  • Changing the typography
  • Changing link colors
  • Creating a new column structure for individual pages

Keep experimenting with these settings until you find the right look for your site.

Search Engine Optimization

The Garage Band theme includes a comprehensive set of SEO options. Open Theme Options › SEO Settings and make whatever changes you like. If you’re already using a third party SEO plugin on your site, you can choose to disable the UpThemes SEO features.

The Garageband SEO settings

Using the Featured Image Slider

Garage Band features a nice big image slider at the top of the homepage. This is the main attention-grabber when people visit your site, so use your best promotional images here.

Open Theme Options › Featured Images. The interface is simple; just upload whichever images you want to display, then tweak the slider animation settings.

Setting Up Your Band Page

You can create an “About Us”-style page with profiles of your band members. You will need to register each member as a user on the site, with a role of Contributor or higher. Each user can edit their profile and choose to be included as a band member. Your “Biographical info” from your WordPress user profile will be displayed on the band page, along with your Gravatar.

band member information

To display these profiles on your site, create a new WordPress page using the Band Members template. All band member profiles will automatically be published on this page.

The Garageband page template

Promoting Your Albums

You can display your latest albums and tracks prominently on your site, next to the main image slider. To create new listings, open Albums › Add New.

Each album needs a title, although you don’t need to add body text to your post. Make sure you include a featured image – preferably the album cover. You can use the custom field to the right of the text editor, entitled Album Purchasing Info, to add links to an external sales page.

Album purchasing info

Uploading Songs to Your Site

The Garage Band theme includes a HTML5-powered mp3 player. For each album that you list on your site, you can upload sample tracks. When creating a new album, use the WordPress ‘Add Media’ function to upload your mp3 files.

The wordpress media uploader

Beneath the main text editor is a custom field entitled Album Track Information. Add a name for each track, select one of your uploaded mp3 files, and include any relevant sales links. These tracks will be displayed in the audio player on the front page of your site.

You can also create a new WordPress page that acts as a library for all the music you’ve uploaded. Just add a new page with the title “Music” or “Discography” or something similar, and use the Music page template.

Managing Your Live Shows

Keep your fans in the loop by publishing a tour schedule on your site. This is an important publicity-building tool for emerging artists.

First of all, you’ll need to create a new WordPress page. Call it “Upcoming Shows” or “Tour Dates” or something like that, and use the Shows List page template.

Once that’s done, you can create new gig listings. Open Shows › Add New. Add a title and some text to describe the show. You can include images within the post, but featured images aren’t necessary. You can also specify a tour, venue, and location for each show. This metadata needs to be added separately, from the Shows menu panel.

The shows menu

User-Powered Fan Galleries

Let your fans upload their own photos of your gigs. This is a great way to build an image collection and chart a visual history of your performances.

To enable this feature, you’ll need to publish a new WordPress page entitled “Submit Your Photos” (or something similar). Use the Fan Gallery Submission Page template. This page is where site visitors will upload their photos. You can change the submission settings under Theme Options › Fan Gallery Submission Form.

The Fan Gallery submission form settings

When visitors upload new images, they will be saved as drafts under Fan Galleries. You’ll need to review each one and choose whether or not to publish it on your site.

You can also create collections to help organize your fan photos. You could create a different collection for each one of your gigs, for example, or sort the photos by year and location. These settings are managed from Fan Galleries › Collections.

Now that you’re set up with your Garage Band WordPRess website, you can focus less on your web presence and more on your music.

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