The first thing I liked about the trial is that it didn’t lead me through an elaborate setup requiring lots of decision making.  The basic ecommerce site creation was step by step:

1. Select a design – The store builder trial comes with just 3 designs or ecommerce themes, but they are well constructed and professional looking. There are lots more you can use later on.
2. Next, you can personalise your web store by giving it a name (which will appear at the top of each page) and adding a logo if you want.
3. Then you can add a product – giving it a name, description, price and adding a picture of it if you have one.
4. Click to save your product and your shop is live with shopping cart, checkout and all facilities available. Of course you will need to add a payment processor later as well as your payment details if you purchase.

So what does Volusion have to offer in terms of facilities?

Shop and Product Features

Product/Category Creation: Creating products is quite intuitive and straightforward. For each product you can choose from the categories in place or simply add a new one to fit your product.

You can use basic functionality to create all of your products quickly or use advanced options to add almost anything you need in a shop.

Product Options: You can create and customise any product options you want or select from several pre-built options e.g. add options for size, colour, weight etc.

Image Functionality: You can add as many images as you want per product – just upload. You can also sort them in any order you want. The images you add to your products are automatically scaled to fit but visitors can click to view the original size. They can also magnify sections of the image to zoom any area by moving their mice mouse over the image. All this is automated; you don’t need to set anything up after you import your image.

Video: You can easily add videos from YouTube for each product (if they exist) by just pasting in a link.

Search Facilities: Like most features, this is automatically set to a default but the results can easily be configured and set e.g. sorting by price, relevance etc. as well as various rows and column settings.

Stock Control: Products can be hidden when out of stock so customers aren’t disappointed. You can also set them to display for a predetermined period of dates. You can set stock levels, alarms for low stock and whether to allow back orders or not.

Currency Control:

Number of Products: The number of items you can sell is dependent on which package you choose and can range from a hundred to unlimited.

Downloadable Products: Yes, you can upload and sell downloadable products such as PDF e-books

Import/Export: You can easily import and export your data as an Excel csv file or as a volusions XML format.  You can also export to QuickBooks format or import in Yahoo’s format.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): You can fully optimise your web shop in the SEO section by adding almost every possible tag, image tags, keywords, product description and title.

Integration: Feeds from Google and Yahoo let you sell products from these vendors directly through your shop. You can also integrate QuickBooks accounting system into your store to make your shop accounting easy.

Sales Functionality

Shopping Cart: The shopping cart is simple clear and effective

Checkout: Volusion eCommerce Store builder creates a standard checkout system but comes with the ability to give your regular shoppers and customers discounts by providing them with voucher codes. You can also set a discount level for each customer and set products to apply that discount when those shoppers make purchases.

Payment Facilities: With volusion eshop builder, you can customise each products price options so you can show standard and sales prices, set as taxable or not etc. Your online store lets your visitors pay by various means.

Payment Gateways: This store builder offers a wide variety of payment gateways and allows integration of various payment facilities such as Google and PayPal.

Delivery & Tracking Facilities: These can be added if available in the country you are in.

Shipping Facilities: You can add various warehouse options or choose a free shipping option.

Shop Look and Feel

Appearance: Volusion’s designs are simple and clear, yet look professional and modern. There is a range of templates to choose from and you don’t need to do any designing so your online store will look good out of the box. However, you can choose from 340 templates (140 of which are free). The free templates are quite good, the paid for templates range in cost from £185+VAT to the mouth-watering £650.00. The more expensive ones are great. You can filter by style, price or industry. If you are familiar with web design however, you can edit the templates any way you like (html/css).

Ease of use: I found this one of the easiest ecommerce stores ever to build with. You don’t get bogged down with too many details and too many things to do as you can avoid more complex portions of the system until you are ready. Creating products is very easy and straightforward just the way I like it.

Accessibility Options: N/A

Translation Options: N/A

Promotional Features

In the product display section of the dashboard, you can add information that can be shown in sections on the homepage including – Featured Products, Top Sellers, Super deals and New Products.

Special Offers: You can set any product you choose to be shown on the front page.

Related Products: N/A

Product Bundles: N/A

Also bought section: N/A

Customer Reviews: visitors to your online shop can review products they have bought and assign them a star rating from 1 to 5.

Rewards: Volusion Store Builder has a built in points system so customers can accumulate points for their purchases which they can spend in the shop later. In addition, you can include an affiliate system within your store, so others can market your products.

Discounts: You can offer discounts by percentage or by amount, off a single product or off a total order.

Custom Pages: You can easily add more pages to your shop or edit the ones created by default.

Customer Interaction

Customer registration facilities: Customer can register so they don’t have to input all their details each time they make a purchase. They can also add products they like to their wish lists so that they don’t have to search all over again, but can view the list once they’re logged in.

eMail/Newsletter: You can update your customers with details of new products by email directly from within your online shop.

Social Network Sharing: email, Twitter, Google plus and Facebook icons are included so your visitors can share information about products they like.

Blog: You can share any information you like through a free blogger account linked you your ecommerce shop.

Security Features

Built in Security (SSL): Security is not built in but you can purchase a security certificate through volusion that encrypts and secures your client and payment data.

Data Protection Information/Privacy Pages/ Terms and Conditions Pages: Are all included and fully detailed. You can edit them if you want.

Packages

Volusion offers a range of packages from Steel, Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum which let you add from between 100 and unlimited products to your shop and use between 1GB and 20GB of space for transferring data.

Conclusion:

Volusion Shop Creator offers a comprehensive eCommerce Website builder with lots of facilities. You can use it out of the box with the essential facilities once you add your payment processor and then add more features as you go along.  It is extremely easy to build a shop and yet includes most of the facilities you are ever likely to need. While it lacks translation, related product and product bundling facilities but it does offer many other promotional features as well as free and paid chat so you can communicate with your visitors and answer their questions. Visit Volusion.com today for a free 14 day trial.

So the question is, what should you be looking for in a music website builder and what services or facilities should you never ignore or do without even if your budget is rather tight.

Cost

Most band or music website builders tend to be online systems which include hosting. If you do register for one of these you will be paying for it perpetually.  Costs vary from about $10 a month for a basic package to up to $20 for a pro or premium package. While the facilities you get in a basic package could be laughable in terms of what you really need, there is no point paying for a higher or pro package from the outset.

Some of these packages provide a free trial, but if you do sign up for a free web site builder trial, that requires you to enter your card details, make sure that you decide early enough whether to invest in it or not and if not, that you remember to cancel your subscription to the services before the trial period expires so that you don’t end up paying for a package you didn’t bargain for.

Terms and conditions

If your domain name is important e.g. the same as the name of your band, make sure you find out if it is easy to take your domain with you when or if you leave for another service provider otherwise you could lose your domain or have to pay a ridiculous sum to move it.

Support

Always find out what kind of support is on offer before you commit yourself. Ideally toll free support would be best but make sure you don’t end up paying premium rates for support. The alternative of a chat support line can work very well especially if you are based in or reside in a different country from the service providers support team. I personally wouldn’t even consider email support or ticket based support as you have no idea whatsoever when your enquiry will be dealt with and it takes far too long to clarify any issues and get  an appropriate response. Also look at what hours of the day support is available. Some providers do offer 24 hour support.

Available Features

Designs: Essential features of any band website builder are the ability to design, choose or use a professionally built website design for your site. Most band web site creators provide either a set of templates or designs for which you can change colors and images but not actual structure. Some more advanced ones let you use your web skills (if you have them) to make up for any shortcomings

Built in Media Player: There should be facilities to let you play your band music (or portions of it) online to visitors, let your fans select tracks or watch your performances on video.

Fan profiles: If your fans feel they own part of or have a stake in your site and can communicate with others with similar tastes on your site and share information, they’ll visit far more often.

e-Commerce Facilities: You should be able to sell your merchandise through your site – preferably both physical media such as CD’s, DVD’s and memorabilia such as banners, T-Shirts etc – but also be able to sell downloadable media such as MP3’s. Most online band site builders come with a shopping cart, some have more sophisticated systems that help you set up shipping, monitor stock levels etc.

Media storage levels and broadcast bandwidth: How much storage and bandwidth you need will depend on how popular you get. You should see if you can embed your media (i.e. upload to YouTube so you use YouTube’s storage space and memory for free.

Domain name: Preferably, use a system that lets you use your own domain name rather than a sub domain i.e. fantasticband.com looks much better and comes across as much more professional than fantasticband.bandbuilder.com

Design capability: The web site creation system should come with and ease of use, easily adaptable and customisable themes and templates (designs) and if possible, also offer facilities to create and edit designs using website building skills. Most band or musician website builders provide a simple wizard so you require no skills beyond basic computer skills to have your site up and running in less than 10 minutes.

Social media: As social networking has taken off worldwide providing a means of spreading information globally within minutes, it is essential that your music web site builder lets you easily add a means for your fans to update and share information about your band, music, events, music etc.

Contact management system: A well designed professional contact system helps you to easily communicate with your fans in bulk while maintaining a personal touch i.e. If I can automatically add their name to an email or newsletter I’m  sending  out (Hi Jim!) that saves me loads of time while they get the feel of a personal touch. Even better systems let you track mail, produce high quality emails or newsletters, control when your emails get sent out etc.

In conclusion, you

BANDZOOGLE

BandZoogle is an online band website builder service that comes with lots of design themes to choose from. The good thing is that you are not forced to choose one of these designs, you can also create your website without needing to learn any web design skills and you can do it quite rapidly e.g. in 10 minutes, with the built in wizards. On the other hand if you do have web design skills such as knowing your html and style sheets, unlike many website builder tools, you can also put these to use to enhance or tweak your web site creation.

Features:

Online Service

Since this is an online service, you get the twin advantages that you don’t have to worry about hosting, setup, or any other thing that will cost you extra money or time – as well as the advantage that you can update your music website from anywhere you have internet access – whether at home or, outside or even abroad. So you can perform a gig and update your site with videos of it on the road if you want to.

Own Domain

Unusual for online website builders BandZoogle lets you own and use your own domain rather than make you use  a subdomain of the service provider such as myownsite.bandzoogle.com without having to pay a premium (but only when you subscribe to a paid plan of course!).

Single Click to insert features

BandZoogle makes it easy to add features to your website by just choosing as feature such as a blog, music player etc., deciding where you want it go, and clicking to insert it. I found this to be a great feature compared to many website builders that lack these features and open source website builders where you need to download a plugin, upload, install, activate and configure – assuming the plugin is compatible with your current version of website builder.  Since this is all in-house, you can be sure that any feature you add will work seamlessly – and they do.

Social Networking

One advantage of online website builder services is that they tend to keep up with and incorporate modern technologies quite rapidly to maintain their competitive edge.  BandZoogle can automatically update your social media including Twitter, Facebook and MySpace I found made it quite easy for visitors to share about my site which in turn boosted traffic to my website.

Built in Auto responder (Bulk Email Contact Management System)

That may sound quite technical but auto-responders are simply a great way of keeping in touch with, updating your followers, clients or visitors with current information with as little work as possible.

BandZoogle band website building service called email blasts offers a service beyond most professional auto-responder services as it not only lets you send out professionally designed emails but also lets you send texts to your fans of followers.

Features:

• Bulk Mailing – so you can mail or text hundreds of messages/emails at a time.
• Promotion Tracking and monitoring – you can see and track which of your contacts read your emails, how many of them read them etc., and even more importantly find out what they find interesting.
• Newsletter Builder – lets you design and create your own professionally crafted email layout
• Scheduled Emails – lets you pre-set dates for your emails to go out so you can write several emails and set them to be released over a period of time without your further attention of the need to remind yourself to send them out.
• Import/Export System – If you already have a list of contacts in electronic format, you can easily upload it into this website builder. Likewise you can export the list when and if you need to.

Fan Club

You can easily build a fan club for your club where any of your fans can easily add their profile, photos etc. plus you can grant these members special privileges and access to hidden or restricted sections of your website.

Other Interactive Features:

Easily add forums, Guest Book, and Polls to your site with just a click to enable your fans interact and engage with each other and you.

Ecommerce (Online sale) Facilities

BandZoogle comes with a secure inbuilt shopping facility that lets you easily distribute your songs online or sell band merchandise online. This is flexible so you can if you wish allow free downloads, pay what you like (above a minimum you set), or pay a fixed fee through a shopping cart and download media such as MP3’s etc. On the other hand you can sell physical media with a full blown ecommerce application that automatically calculates shipping fees and notifies you if the stock you have is running out (assuming of course that you input the initial stock).

Data Analysis

This music website builder comes with a powerful fan tracking system that lets you know where the majority of your fans (at least the ones who visit your website!) are from, exactly when spikes in traffic happened, and which music they prefer (based on which tracks they listen to or download or buy the most). Why is this important? It can help you know where to plan your next event, or the kind of announcement or event that sparks off lots of interest.

Costs:

Currently BandZoogle offers 3 plans, Lite, Standard and Pro at $9.95, $14.95 and $19.95 respectively, each of which differ in the amount of storage available to you and the number of fans you can support online.

The Lite package only supports a trivial 100 fans, but the Standard lets you access and communicate up to 1000 fans as well as giving you access to fan statistics and providing you with access to modify the design and structure as much as you want. The Pro gives you access to 10,000 fans and band supporters as well as unlimited storage.

Great thing about this musician’s website builder is that you can try it for free for 30 days without any commitment (by which I mean financial commitment, and not your time, energy and effort) so it’s not one of those online web site systems where you provide your credit card details and then get billed because you forgot to cancel before the trial period ends.

Usage:

You’re led step by step through an interface so simple you can’t get it wrong. Basically you’re given an instruction, told what it will accomplish then shown what the result will appear like or what will change. In many cases you can reverse or alter the change

1. Create a title.
2. Choose general font style
3. Choose site style with options from a set, filter by category; color (though some categories such as film had no themes available). The good thing is you can see your design changes immediately.
4. Upload your own photo to replace the main photo or use one of their stock photos (range of stock photos was disappointingly limited but like them you can get photos for free from Flickr as long as you credit the owners.
5. Click to automatically add pages or  create your own
6. View site
7. Edit page content or Add on features.

Pros:

• Real no-risk free trial lets you walk through the whole process and see how to use most of the facilities.
• Well developed contact management system with tracking.
• Robust e-Commerce lets you sell downloadable or physical media.
• Use your own domain name at no extra cost.

Cons:

• Not as many design themes as I would have liked.

Conclusion:

BandZoogle is well worth a try – especially since the 1 month trial on offer is risk free. You can easily build a professional looking website without any website building skills and if you do happen to be web savvy, you can easily customise your band website to be unique. With 3 plans available, you can easily grow your website as your fan base increases, while at $20 for the highest plan including web hosting it is quite inexpensive as well.

At what point can your website be considered successful? The answer to this question is dependent on which viewpoint you’re looking from – yours or your visitors. Your personal evaluation of your site as successful may be at odds with that of your visitors. For example if your purpose in building your website is for your personal pleasure and you have no means of gathering feedback of viewing visitor statistics, then your personal valuation will be all that counts.

There are many parameters you can use to test the success of a site. These include revenue or income generated, volume of traffic, degree of interaction, publicity generated, authority, keyword ranking (and in Google – PageRank). In most cases it will obviously be a combination of these so let’s try to understand how these parameters indicate website success:

Revenue

If your aim is to make lots of money then whether or not you consider your website successful is dependent on what you estimated as it’s financial potential and whether or not it is able to generate that level of revenue. In many cases, and dependent on your revenue generation model, that can be hard to calculate e.g. how could anyone have valued Twitter or Facebook or known how successful they would be. If your revenue model is based on Google AdSense adverts on the other hand, you can calculate how much money you can make from Google AdSense as a a minimum if you can get your site to rank in top positions. So before you start building your website you will need to find out or determine

a) how much revenue potential your topic or topics keywords have

b) how much demand there is for your product or topic

c) whether there is long term potential or not – (I once built a site targeting 32 inch televisions – which guess what will be completely redundant soon as TV’s become larger)

d) how you plan to monetize (type and usage of revenue generators on) your website d) the potential number of visitors (traffic levels) to expect on your site

apart from many other factors such as how to write content that attracts visitors, how to optimise your website and how to boost its popularity on the web.

The degree to which you which you can do these things will determine to a large degree whether you are able to make money on the web, how quickly you can make it and whether you can sustain it.

Web Traffic

In Internet terms, traffic means the number of visitors who visit your site, either through finding your website in a search engine, or clicking a link on someone else’s website or having visited previously and noting your site for further visits. The amount of traffic you are likely to receive is dependent on many, many factors including your topic or keywords, and your ranking or rather how important or relevant search engines evaluate your site to be with regards to your page and site topics. The more relevant, the more traffic they will send your way. You should note that this is not static – in short you can do things to make your site more relevant, unfortunately, so can your competitors with regards to their own site. What can you do to boost your ranking and position – create and continue to create lots of relevant, informative content on your website, encourage interaction with polls, forums, linking to and from your website, encourage comments – basically make your site very dynamic.

more to come soon….

Google provides an absolutely free traffic analysis tool called Google Analytics that enables you to tailor your website building efforts to attract more traffic (visitors) and potentially boost your websites income. Though Google’s results are mainly based on Google traffic, it is the biggest search engine and anything you do that helps you on Google, will also help you on other search engines.

In essence these tools help you to optimise your website, find out how visitors see your website, where they come from, and how to build your site to become easier to access.

In most cases while building your websites content, you probably try to guess what keywords or text potential visitors will type into search engines and try to include these keywords on your website in the hope that the search engines will lead them to your site.

Google Analytics helps take away the guess work by recording exactly what the visitors who were brought to your website typed into the search engines that sent them.

It also helps you find out what proportion of your website traffic is new or unique traffic as opposed to repeat traffic so you can tell if your site is becoming more attractive and useful to visitors.

These are some of the things you can find out with Google Analytics:

- Which are the most popular and highly visited pages on your website

- Which links visitors click on most and which pages they jump to on your site.

- From which websites people come to your site and where they go to when they leave.

- What proportion of your traffic is from search engines, referring sites, direct access etc.

- Which countries or cities your web site traffic comes from and how much comes from each country.

- What technology your visitors use to access the web e.g. operating system such as MS Windows, Internet access such as broadband, browsers etc.

- The bounce rate of your site and how long visitors stay on your website.

from these you can find out what your visitors are looking for on your website, which locations or countries you should be targeting, your visitors technology which could help you find out if it would be worth having video on your site etc. and from the bounce rate or time spent visiting whether or not your website and it’s content is attractive to traffic.

So how do you use Google Analytics. You first of all need to register a free email account with Google. Next you register with Google analytics (just type those words into your browser while on Google, to find it). Next you input all the usual details e.g. your details, website address etc.

For it to work properly, you need to verify your account by putting a piece of tracking code on your website or loading a tiny text file into your web space. Don’t worry. It’s perfectly safe. This procedure is just to ensure that you the website owner are the one trying to find out all about your web sites visitors. (Contact us if you need help with this).

Once this is set up, all you need to do to track your website data and view your graphical reports is to sign into Google and click on the Analytics link.

You can easily add as many sites as you own to your account and view your website traffic trends graphically over periods of time. With this information at hand it will become much easier to tailor and optimise your website content to attract more visitors.

As a result, more and more, they are removing websites and web site pages that they consider to be redundant,
of low qualityor providing little useful or original information to visitors from their results pages.

The point of all this is that certain methods people used to get traffic and generate large amounts of income have become redundant.
For example in the past you could create a website that automatically took copied or scraped content from other websites with the same general theme and added that to your own website. Unfortunately, that no longer works.

On the other hand, you could, create an article with your links embedded; visit websites such as ezinearticles, isnare or articlebase
and through them distribute that same article to hundreds of other websites in return for them linking to your website.
That no longer works as well either, as even though it is perfectly legal, Google considers these copies of your article to be duplicate content. Since the search engine doesn’t want its index cluttered with thousands of copies of the same information it now severely discounts these links.

Among other things, the amount of profit you can get from your website is proportional to the number of visitors that you can get to visit your site. This is in turn related to your where your site appears in search engine results pages.
It is known for example that the first website on a page of Google results get s 42% of the traffic (almost 3 times as much traffic as the second page on the list).

So the question is what does Google consider when deciding on which position to assign to any particular website?

This is a vital question to ask as your position for any keyword determines how much traffic you receive.
It has been determined that Google counts the number of times other sites link to your sites pages as being a vote for their popularity.
It also takes note of the PageRank of the page the link is on, the relevance of the keyword to your site,
as well of how relevant that keyword is in the site it appears so if your keyword is chainsaws and it appears in a website about cooking for example, Google will not give it as much value.

So what can you do to ensure your website appears high up in search engine results and increase your website traffic for free?
You should get more and more links pointing to your website.

Six ways to increase the number of links pointing to your website and boost your website traffic for free are:
1) Publish articles in article directories, but uniquely across many directories. Dont expect to receive hundreds of links from one article in a directory.
2) Publish articles on your own website. Publish lots and lots of unique articles each of them targeting particular keywords or sets of keywords.
3) Publish articles on other peoples websites with your links included.
4) Exchange links with other related sites, but always three-way, and never in exchange for money.
5) Add your site to as many business directories as you can find.
6) Link your articles together with lots of keyword based internal links pointing to each other

So basically do anything you can to get more relevant links pointing to your website while ensuring you dont violate Googles terms and conditions e.g. you must not pay a website to link to yours.
Also build your links surely and steadily at a constant rate and in a distributed manner. Google will frown on you suddenly gaining 10 high ranking links if you have only gained 20 low rank links in the last 6 months.

Above all, you need to build your own website into a massive high quality resource of useful and relevant information so that other resources link to you naturally.