Well I have worked around IT for the last 20 ish years and been involved in quite a few website projects and even developed a few back in the day so I'm happy to lend any experience I can to help out our fellow PLAPA's 🙂
The biggest issue is usually not the website as such ...but what to put on it! "Content" Yep that stuff that keeps people coming back and claiming an interest in what you have to offer.
So what makes a good website then? That's a great question and really depends on the kind of content you want to put out there, for a music/mixer/producer/artist type site, then I would suggest plenty of content that showcases your work. Also some easily found info in case the viewer want's to go deeper into specific info about that work or your services etc.
Navigation is the key to a great site and a good rule of thumb is that the viewer should not have to click more that 3 times to find what they want.
Fancy graphics is another key ingredient, nothing turns people away faster than an "amateur" looking site, so if you have the skill of graphic design, then great, otherwise consider hiring someone else to come up with a graphic design you can use on your site.
Keep it simple and think about your target audience in terms of what you might expect them to use when viewing your site, a lot of websites these days have different templates "layout" for mobile users which is great, look for a solution that enables you to do this if possible. You know how many smart phones and tablet devices are out there, I know I use a few of them. 🙂
Get yourself a domain name and try and secure the one you want before ordering any of your "fancy graphics" you'd be surprised to find just how hard it is to come up with a domain name that hasn't already been taken....
Find a decent website hosting company that offers the right kind of price/performance/features you need (also sometimes harder than you might think)as well as the ability to quickly setup your flavour of website a.k.a. the type of website you intend to use such as a content management system like Drupal, Joomla, WordPress etc. Usually the same hosting company can offer the other essential services as well such as DNS and Mail hosting.
Once the site is up and responding to your domain name then you can apply the template/grahpics/logo etc and start adding your content.
I'm not sure if that covered too little or too much...Let me know. 🙂
Cheers...Andrew
Rich Zei.
Anders Isberg
Steve A
Andrew Mckenzie
Chris Sweet
Rich Zei
Magnus Johansson