Marco Steinhäuser

Actually I wrote the blog post “The Scuttles at Anker Leipzig” to check out the module “Upcoming Events” whether WordPress is working nice for bands and artists that want to run an interactive website instead of a stupid static one. You know, I don’t really like that upcoming Flash intro pages (that you might skip in best case) followed by links like “Band”, “Members”, “Sound”, “Guest Book”, “Imprint”, the complete design held dark-colored. You can find that scheme for every bl**dy band, even for the most wanted. “Band” and “Members” usually are rarely updated, “Sound” is mostly illegally implemented and “Imprint” seems to be a German legal invitation against common sense in most cases. The only interactive part seems to be the “Guest Book” where you may find stuff like saw you yesterday and really appreciated it, if you are lucky. Ages ago, Verena brought up the idea of heaving a weblog for a band homepage instead: Post your upcoming events like On this and that date, we will have our next gig at [location]. We are very proud to perform there again because [reason]. The plugin “Upcoming Events” additionally delivers an event calendar as a widget to your site bar. The interesting thing, especially for band who don’t perform every day / week is: Upcoming events will be listed and treated more like a topic then a calendar. The only thing you have to do is to define a custom field date and the value for it. Once your gig is done, publish a new post: Yesterday we performed at [location]. It was lots of fun, we liked you as audience, here are some pictures [3-4 pictures/videos]. From now on, people might react with certain comments and fill up your specific event page with contents. Comparing to a guest book entry (the word itself sounds obsolete somehow) that method looks like really search machine relevant, doesn’t it? For me, it looks like a real alternative. But talking to the band guys and musicians, I really found reservations: They do not even got what I was talking about! Most of them just know how to turn on a computer. Most feel like they have to have a website. Talking about interactivity and maybe weblogs is too much for them, even if you would explain how to update the website’s content, simply sending an e-mail. This would probably be the most suspect thing. 🙂 What to do?