As a long time supporter of WordPress; I believe that it is much more than a tool for just creating blogs. I recently got chatting to a friend who’s in a folk band.

People around the world have found WordPress to be an easy way to publish their thoughts and ideas. So, why not musicians?

Using a free account on Community Hosts, we quickly setup a WordPress site, with a stylish and clean template. This gave the band an immediate presence that they could start working with.

As the band already had a few other sites (MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter etc) we set about extending the site to work with some of these. Notably we installed the Twitter Tools plugin that allows the band to tweet directly from the website – but also incorporates the ability to automatically tweet about any new posting that is made on the site.

We also added the highly popular Audio Player so that the band’s latest and greatest songs could be listened to directly from the site.

In order to give the band an easy way to promote gigs and tours we added the Gig Calendar plugin. This is an incredible plugin that allows them to set up venues, gigs and tours and have them automatically create posts on the site and promote them to the fans.

Other notable additions to the site were:

• Sexy Bookmarks – my favourite social media sharing plugin to allow others to share the post on the website to their friends.
• Contact Form 7 – my favourite plugin for handling fill-out forms
• Flickpress – a handy plugin for displaying photos from Flickr
• All in One SEO Pack – the best plugin for managing SEO and promoting the site’s position in Google and other search engines.

Take a look at the finished product and see what you think. Not bad for a freebie! (www.greenfortune.co.uk)