The people who decide whether to book you don't browse your website: they cut through it. They open three pages, almost always in the same order, and then decide whether to write to you. This article covers which pages those are, what belongs on each, and which pages don't deserve to delay your launch.
How a decision-maker reads you
An artistic director closing a season, a festival programmer, a parent looking for a teacher: none of them explores a website. They search your name on Google, open the first result, and cut through three pages. The biography. The recordings. The dates.
It's the path I've watched repeat for years on the musicians' websites I look after, across more than 250 projects built since 1999. The rest of the site has its place, and once things are running it earns its keep. But the decision to contact you forms on those three pages, and they deserve to be built as if they were the only ones.
1. The biography: the front door
It's almost always the first page opened, because it answers the evaluator's first question: who am I looking at?
How to write a biography that works is its own article: 5 Things Your Online Bio Should Never Say. The point here is different: the bio deserves to be treated as a main page, not a formality. It's the text that will be copied into programme notes, read aloud in introductions, compared with your colleagues'.
A quick test: if your biography works printed in a concert programme but feels heavy on a screen, it was written for the wrong context. On a screen people read the opening, and the opening has to say at once what you do and at what level.
2. The recordings: what represents you today goes on top
Evaluators listen to beginnings, not to everything. They start the first track on the page, let it run for a while, and form an impression the rest of the page will rarely change.
That's why your media page is not an archive: it's a choice. One recent, representative recording at the top, with sound quality to match, is worth more than ten videos accumulated for completeness. The order is a statement: the first thing anyone hears is the thing you chose.
The reverse also holds. A video with poor audio is not neutral, it subtracts. If a recording no longer represents you, or sounds bad, the right move is not to publish it, even when it's the only one of a repertoire you care about.
3. The dates: the page that says you're active
The evaluator's third question is the simplest: does this person actually perform? Where, with whom, when?
The dates page answers even when it's frozen, and then it answers badly: a calendar stuck in last year says the website is abandoned, and leaves the doubt that the career is too. A few upcoming dates, added as soon as they're confirmed, are enough for the page to tell of work in progress. In stretches without public concerts, the same page holds up if it presents the season, active collaborations, projects in preparation.
If your site is already online and keeping it alive is the struggle, that's another article: Your Website Is Live. Three Things Decide Whether It Works.
4. The pages that can wait
The complete downloadable press kit. The discography with every track and label. The exhaustive press review. The blog. All pages a mature website is happy to host, and none of them justifies a delay.
It's the mistake I meet most often in people planning their site: the launch slips by months because "there's still material missing". A live website with three solid pages starts working immediately. A complete website sitting in draft doesn't work at all, and meanwhile whoever searches for you finds your socials, or nothing.
Where to start
If the site is still to be built, or rebuilt, this is the starting point: a biography written for the screen, a media page that is a choice rather than an archive, a calendar that says you're active. The rest grows later, one page at a time, once the material genuinely exists.
It's also how I set up projects: packages start from the essential modules and expand when needed. If you want to work out where to start in your case, write to me: that's exactly what the first consultation is for.