The most popular and highly trafficked music websites and blogs all seem to have one major component in common: a unique and original artistic style. If your skills and strengths run more towards the conceptual end of design or you’re better with development than Graphic Design, consider outsourcing the fine detail artwork to a real professional. It takes a certain knack to come up with a cohesive theme for a website that isn’t a ripoff of another common web design trend, as well as distinctive art to go with it.

Clearly, a music website or blog will feature tunes prominently above all else. A good way to make your site as convenient and accessible as possible is to support as many codecs and music formats as possible. Ogg, Theora, WebM, H.264, MPEG-4 and Flash are all fairly popular file containers so you’ll want to make sure you include all of them. Another great way to stand out is by accentuating your media players will your own themes and style. There are tons of great tutorials available on line that will show you how to stand out with uniquely designed media player portals.

As with fashion sites, it’s smart to make the media the focus and not clutter the page with too much extraneous data to distract viewers. Keep the music and artist information short and sweet, possibly linking out to additional resources if the visitor is interested in learning more about a particular band, artist, song or video. As your pages will feature a lot of heavy media files and take a while to load as opposed to mostly static content, you’ll need to focus on speed optimization techniques more than with other sites, like using CDNs to load content, as well as file compression and minification to cut down on load times.