Artist Websites Suck…

And so will this one—eventually. Give it some time, though.

But welcome back . . . or just welcome.

This is the third iteration of petersaltzman.com. I purchased the domain name back in 2000 or so, just to make sure none of my namesakes lurking around the World Wide Web—as we proudly called it back then—didn’t grab it first. There’s a doctor out there somewhere named Peter Saltzman. I keep expecting him to call one day, offering me a ton of money for the domain name. If it’s enough cash, I’ll consider a name change.

The first petersaltzman.com came out in 2003 to coincide with the release of my album Things Better Left Said. It was designed by a real web designer in conjunction with a music-marketing guy I was consulting with at the time. The site was small, dark, and boring—too narrowly focused on projecting a supposedly marketable version of Peter Saltzman, the artist.

The second version came maybe three years later. I created it using a template-hosting system from a company specializing in musician websites. It had some semi-useful, built-in features like playlists, calendars, bio pages, image galleries, media pages, etc.—all somewhat less constricting, but still boring. A glorified, digital résumé. As wth the first iteration, I ended up hating it. After three to four years, I abandoned that one too.

There may have been another one right after that. If so, I undoubtedly dumped that in short order. So maybe this latest iteration is the fourth.

While building that second and/or third site, I learned some HTML/CSS, along with a small smattering of PHP and JavaScript. I hand-coded a site for my album Kabbalah Blues/Quantum Funk—meaning it was developed with no special software other than a text editor. That helped me become, if not a full-fledged developer, at least a person who understood something of how web technologies worked. That is, enough to become a real pain in the ass to actual developers I would work with in the future.

So I still owned the URL. And the good doctor never called.

Someday, I told myself, I’ll do something with it again. I did try. Multiple versions, in fact. But none had gone live because not one was ever quite right—they still felt like résumés.

What was I looking for? Since it’s a personal website, it had to be more, well, personal. The site should tell stories rather than be a press package to deify The Artist. It should tell stories of success and failure. It should make music rather than just hype my past achievements. It should, in essence, be a work of art in its own right.

It should be music and words rather than just be about them.

Inevitably, this site might prove not quite right either—nothing ever is. In the end, it still has to do its job as a résumé site, providing useful information about the Artist Still Known As Peter Saltzman.

But what I’ve done here is to put all of that stuff in its own little corner. You can find it under the Peter Saltzman menu: bios, events, press, etc. You’ll also see the inevitable headlines about new products, events, reviews, and so on. But the focus here will be on the music and the stories.

petersaltzman.com is designed and written by me. The content is my own. It’s personal—and hopefully—it will stay that way.