NoteWay Notes Newsletter #13
Welcome to our next edition of NoteWay Notes, the official newsletter from NoteWay Media.
This edition includes new features that are available for your NoteWay website plus some tips on how to build your website on a shoestring budget.
The NoteWay Team
www.noteway.com
In This Issue
- Personalize Your NoteWay Theme
- Featured Article: Create a Professional Website on a Shoestring Budget
- Image Captions on Your NoteWay Website
- NoteWay To Give Workshop for MN Bluegrass & Old-Time Music Association
Personalize Your NoteWay Theme
Are you happy with your NoteWay website theme, but would like to change just one or two elements of the design? If so, we now offer a way for you to personalize your theme using our new “theme override” system. You can change colors, borders, and background images to make your theme match your preferences. If you would like to tweak your design, please contact us and we will make the necessary changes for you behind the scenes.
Another feature we have added is the ability to add custom content to every page of your site. This is useful if you want to display, say, a logo on every page. Custom content can be added to the navigation, footer, or main content area of a page. Please contact us if you would like to take advantage of this new functionality.
Featured Article: Create a Professional Website on a Shoestring Budget
If you were to take an informal survey of musicians and bands, most would probably say that they didn’t have a website to promote their music yet (or at least not one that they were satisfied with). And if you were to then ask them why, most would probably say that they couldn’t afford to do anything else.
Speaking as someone who specializes in websites for musicians, let me shatter that misconception. Having a professional looking website to promote your music does not need to break your budget. Nor does it require that you spend the next few months reading a stack of programming books from Barnes & Noble.
All it takes is a little research, a willingness to roll up your sleeves, and a few pointers from articles like this one to get you started. Armed with this knowledge, every band can have a professional looking website to promote their music for a fraction of the cost you might expect.
Image Captions on Your NoteWay Website
We are happy to announce that you can now add captions to the images on your website.
There has always been a field for “image caption” in the control panel, but this caption was only visible to people who are viewing your site with images turned off. Some people choose to turn off images in their browser because it makes pages load faster (especially on slow dial-up connections). Others have images disabled because they are visually impaired. The “image caption” field gives these people a way to understand the content of an image even though they can’t see the image itself.
Based on your feedback, we realized that providing the option to show the image caption below the image would also be useful for those who have images turned on. Therefore, you now have the option of showing or hiding the image caption.
By default, all image captions are not shown below the image. Here are some brief instructions on how to make a caption visible:
- From the Main Menu, select “Website Pages”
- Select the page you want to edit
- Under “Common Tasks:”, select “Add/update image on this page”
- Select the “Show image caption” button under the “Image caption” field
- Click “Save changes”
The caption will now be displayed below the image on that page.
While we were adding this new feature, we also made some improvements to a couple of the image layout options. Sometimes when selecting the “Image on the right with text flowing around it” or the “Image on the left with text flowing around it” option, the text would not properly flow around the image. This was often the case if the image was too wide. Now the image will be reduced to 50% of the width of the main content area of the page, allowing ample room for the text to flow around it. If you notice a change on any of your pages and you do not like the text flowing effect, you can select one of the three other image layout options where the text appears below the image instead.
We hope that you enjoy this new feature. As always, we appreciate any feedback you may have about it.
NoteWay To Give Workshop for MN Bluegrass & Old-Time Music Association
NoteWay Media will be giving a presentation on how to promote your music online in Minneapolis on Saturday, November 4. This will be part of the upcoming Harvest Jamboree, brought to you by the Minnesota Bluegrass & Old-Time Music Association.
We will discuss how having your own professional website can act as your online promoter by publicizing your schedule, inviting fans to join guest books, sending email newsletters, providing sound samples of your music, selling your music directly, and much more. Plus we will talk about the pros and cons of MySpace and how that compares to having your own site.
Whether you already have your own website or are thinking about starting one for the first time, this presentation is a must-attend for everyone wanting to promote their music online.
This will be one of several “band development workshops” being offered during the Harvest Jamboree. Please visit the MBOTMA website for more information.
http://www.minnesotabluegrass.org/calendar/harvest/workshops.html