The Drive for a Chico Music Scene Website
What the heck is all this about and what is Chico Music Scene? When I started photographing the local music scene websites were hard-coded HTML websites. That basically means no movement, or animations on your site, boring. And it was hard to change or update. So, it was easier to post images to social media as they shared your images widely at that time. It was an inexpensive way to share images and gain views and followers.
Over a few years their algorithm for sharing your posts was reduced 4 times to the point I quit posting on social media. I began to search for website builders and eventually built Chico Music Calendar, a website that hosted galleries and a calendar. As thousands of images gathered over a few years, I realized each focus, the calendar and event images needed to be dedicated sites. I am now on my third iteration of this website, and I am happy with what I have built, and hope you are too!
Artists may download image(s) for promotion or a personal collection.
Curtis Pope · photographer
In deciding to build and post website galleries, I realized it made sense from an artist marketing perspective, as well. As consumers, we may need up to 7 points of contact to decide to purchase an item or service. Building websites to support events and images provides more contact points for artists, and myself. This website has SEO features including alt image descriptions and tags. Search engines will move images with good SEO to higher rankings. So I look to see this site climb as I put more galleries in place. I also hope I to move the Chico Music Calendar website to a non-profit platform, to sustain it for many years to come.
Social image sharing algorithm went downhill fast!
When I stopped posting regularly on social media of the face, only 2% of your followers would see your posts without paying. And payments were tiered, so you need to spend a lot of money for people to see images. At the time they were pushing video content. When I started posting image galleries, it was 16% of your followers would see a new post, so yeah. No good.
Chico Music Scene website is one facet of one of this photography project where I archive images from the local music scene. The goal of this project is to capture elements of dance drum, DJ and solo/duo/bands providing high quality images. There is a focus on providing coverage to women and people of color.
Finding a Foundation for Growth
So, as I have worked on my photography (skills and projects) over the years, I taught myself WordPress skills. I started the process by searching for the Blog/CMS software to test after paying for my first hosting and website. After testing several CMS (Drupal, Plone, Typo3, Joomla, Xoops b2evolution) codes, I settled on WordPress to develop my sites with. At the time, WordPress version 2.69 was out and I built my first site at version 3.21. The current version is 6.91, so I have been at this for a bit.
Since the start, I’ve spent years testing themes, plugins and watching the WordPress ecosystem and the coding itself grow and change, as it must for any website development code. I have had personal setbacks with finance, health and personal tragedy along the way to bringing to life my current websites including my other projects, Sleek n Shiny Images and Bidwell Park Wildflowers. Or, life as we know it. But I am still here with this passion, vision, and mission.
I share these images and galleries with a hope of providing high quality images of local and traveling artists that perform in venues in and around Chico, CA.