What to put on a band website when you only have an hour
Put four things on your website, in this order: upcoming shows, a way to contact you, one good photo, and music. A booker who lands on your site is checking whether you're active, whether you're easy to book, and what you sound like — in that order. Everything else is optional.
Shows, first
If a promoter or venue manager is looking at your site, they're usually deciding one of two things: is this act still playing, and are they good enough to book somewhere else. A dated list of upcoming shows answers both. It says you're active, and it lets them see where else you've played, which acts as a reference check without anyone having to make a phone call.
Put this at the top of the homepage, not on a separate "tour" page buried in a menu. If you have no shows booked right now, don't leave the section empty — list your last three or four with venue names. A gap with nothing in it reads as inactive, whether or not that's true.
Contact, second
This is the section bands most often get wrong by making it hard to find or hard to use. A booker deciding between your band and another act is not going to hunt for a way to reach you. If your only contact method is a Facebook message button buried behind a login, you've lost people who don't want to create an account just to ask about your rate.
Put an email address in plain text, not just a contact form. Forms are fine as an option but a form that goes to an inbox you don't check is worse than nothing. If you take gigs through a manager or an agent, say so and give their contact, not yours — bookers want to know who actually answers.
One good photo, third
You need one photo that shows what you look like on stage, in reasonable light, at a size that doesn't look stretched or pixelated on a phone. That's it. You do not need a gallery of forty photos from every gig since your band started. A promoter scanning your site needs to answer "do these people look like a band I'd put on my stage," and one clear shot does that. Ten mediocre ones make them scroll instead of book.
If you're going to spend money on anything for this website, spend it on one proper photo session. It does more work than any other single item on the page.
Music, fourth — and it should be easy to hear
Music matters, but it comes after the first three because most bookers have already decided they're interested before they click play. Put two or three tracks embedded directly on the page. Don't make someone click through to a separate streaming profile, and don't make them download a file. If they have to leave your site to hear you, many of them won't come back to book you.
What to leave off
Long bios. Nobody booking a venue is reading three paragraphs about how the band formed or what your influences are. Two or three sentences: who you are, what you play, where you're based, how long you've been doing it. If someone wants more for a write-up or a grant application, that's what a press kit is for — the website itself should stay skimmable.
Guestbooks and comment sections. These were common on band websites years ago and they don't do anything now except collect spam. Nobody checking whether to book you is reading what a fan wrote in 2019. If you want a way for fans to feel connected, a mailing list does that job and is actually useful to you later — a guestbook just sits there.
Autoplay audio or video. Never do this. A booker or a fan landing on your page with sound blasting immediately, especially on a phone in public, will close the tab before they've seen anything else on the page. Let people choose to press play. This is one of the few things on this list that can actively cost you a booking rather than just wasting space.
Anything that requires an account to view. Password-protected pages, login walls, "join to see our music" — all of it adds friction between a booker and the four things they actually came to check. Save any password protection for things that genuinely need it, like an unreleased demo you're sending to one specific promoter.
Putting it together
If you're rebuilding a site from scratch, build it in this order and stop when it's done: shows, contact, one photo, music, short bio last. Roadshow builds this structure from a plain description of your band, and the same site generates a press kit PDF — bio, photos, dates, booking contact — for the situations where someone wants a document rather than a link. Both are worth having, but the website is what gets checked first, so it's the one to get right.