What I learnt rebuilding my website

Rebuilding your own website is a lot like clearing out a storage room. You think it'll take an afternoon, you open the door and find boxes you don't even remember packing. In my case, the boxes were 273 singles, more than 280 music videos, hundreds of Shorts and every lyric I've written in two years. All of it had to fit on mikesaintlouis.com without visitors getting lost.

I'm not going to say how long it took or how many people drop by, because that's not what interests me. What interests me is what I worked out along the way, which was a good deal more than I expected.

The lyrics have to live at home

The first decision was the clearest. Every song has its own page, and on that page are the complete lyrics. Not an excerpt, not a link to some other site that might shut down tomorrow. The whole lyric, on my website.

For a long time I took it for granted that the lyrics were already out there, on the platforms or on sites that collect them. And yes, sometimes they are. But they're often copied badly, cut short or with a line changed. When you've written every lyric yourself, that stings a bit. It's like seeing your name misspelt on a poster.

So now the lyrics have their own section, in alphabetical order, at mikesaintlouis.com/letras. If you want to know exactly what «La dieta del cucurucho» says, it's there, next to the music video and the Spotify link. I learnt that whatever you don't keep safe yourself, nobody else will keep with the same care.

The second lesson is about gifts. I give my music away: the GAYFOLK trilogy as one ZIP per album, and the 273 singles one by one, no sign-up, no email address required. I already did that before. What I took care of this time was where it happens.

On a lot of musicians' websites, downloading something means getting bounced to another service, with a different interface, a different design and sometimes the odd advert. That bounce breaks something. The person was in your home, listening to your music, reading your lyrics, and suddenly you send them out into the street to collect the parcel.

Now it all happens at mikesaintlouis.com/descargas and mikesaintlouis.com/descargas/singles. Click and it's yours. It looks like a small technical detail, and for me it changed the whole feel of the thing. Giving something away and making people queue to pick it up isn't quite giving.

There's one doubt I haven't settled. Since I don't ask for anything in return, I don't know who takes the albums. I have no mailing list and nobody's details. Some days it strikes me as commercially daft. Most days it strikes me as the right thing to do. I'm sticking with the second, though I know it's a gamble.

A page for the small things

The Shorts were the big problem. I have hundreds of short videos scattered across social media, and outside their natural habitat they get lost in no time. A fifteen-second clip that did really well months ago sinks under the new ones within days. Lots of people found me that way, through «Tan Cateto» on TikTok, and then had no way of rewatching the clips without scrolling and scrolling for half an hour.

So I gave them a page of their own, mikesaintlouis.com/shorts. They're all there, staying put, with no algorithm deciding which one gets its turn today. What I learnt from this is that short things deserve an archive too. We sometimes treat short videos as disposable, and then it turns out they're the door almost everyone came in through.

Alongside it is mikesaintlouis.com/videos, with the full-length music videos and, next to each one, links to listen on Spotify, Deezer, Tidal, Amazon Music or YouTube Music. Two separate pages because they're two separate things. Mixing them would have been quicker, but worse.

The blog, song by song

The part that took the most work, and the one I love most now, is the blog. As well as articles like this one, there's an entry for every single, with the story of each song. Writing them made me look at my own catalogue in a way I hadn't expected.

When you release this much music, each song spends a few days in the spotlight and then fades into the background. Going back to every one of them to tell where it came from was like rereading old letters. Some made me laugh. Others made me a little embarrassed. None left me cold, and that says something in itself.

I also learnt that a website isn't a shop window. If it were, a pretty photo and a button would do. An artist's website is more like a neighbourhood library: it has to be tidy, it has to have a search box, and it has to let people stay and read without being hurried along. That's why there's a search box, a press section and an FAQ. None of that shines in a screenshot. All of it shows when someone looks for something specific and finds it.

I also built the site in Spanish and English. I write in Spanish and I'm not going to change that, but anyone arriving from abroad deserves at least to understand where they are and what they can take home.

There are things I'm still not happy with. There are texts I'd rewrite and sections I'd arrange differently. I suppose your own website is never completely finished, just as a storage room never stays tidy for more than a week.

What I am clear about is the underlying idea: I want everything of mine to be in a place that's mine. Social networks change their rules whenever they like. Platforms decide what gets seen and what doesn't. On my website, I decide where every song, every lyric and every video goes. That peace of mind is worth the work.

It's all at mikesaintlouis.com, with the doors wide open.