Soose to the Rescue

Scenario: I walk into work (my real job, sales associate a major electronics retailer- not Circuit City...) and the place is empty. I mean, there are employees, shelves, peg-hooks and a customer service desk, but there isn't a single product on the shelves. Not even a dusty bag of M&M's, or a sign letting you know what should be there. A few customers wander in, maybe walk through a few aisles, but soon leave once they realize their needs cannot be met at my store. Twilight Zone style.

What's wrong with this picture? The store is pristine. The shelves are in the right spot, employees are knowledgeable and helpful and the cash registers are booted up. However, none of this matter is you don't have a product and an explanation.

The explanation comes first. If you have gotten this far, decided on a name and all that, you have probably set some kind of mission statement. For example, Erica and I decided on something like this: We promise to bring you a wide variety of dance types and styles while upholding a standard of well-choreographed and age/level appropriate dances with a guarantee of quality. This isn't word-for-word, but you get the idea. We know what we want to do. You should decide what it is that the site is providing and how you are providing it, then tell everyone. Use your homepage as some sort of mission statement or explanation as to what your site does. It's important. If someone were to stumble upon your site during a search, they need to quickly and clearly understand why exactly they landed there (catchy slogans and gimmicks are sometimes helpful, but that's another day).

Great, you've created a home screen, do you have a product yet? Funny, you can't sell anything if you don't have it posted. Are you selling t-shirts? Do you have a pictures of all the different designs you sell? If not, you better start clicking the camera.

In my case, the content comes from third parties. Similar to iStock Photo, where people can upload their own photos to sell for a split profit. Part of the money goes to the website, part to the artist. That's what we want to do for our choreography customers. Trouble is, we have to find people who are willing to take the time to transcribe their movements onto paper and possibly a video, but are also willing to do this with a chance of making nothing at all.

Of course Erica and I can post our own stuff, but it's time consuming and we need to hone in on a common layout for written choreography. We want our customers to know what they are going to get the second, third and fourth time they use our service.

This is a fairly decent example of video instruction.


Content is key. You have decided your audience, so appeal to them, give them the quality they are looking for, something you are proud of. If you can't do that, than it doesn't matter how classy your site design is, you will not be successful.

Erica and I officially have our site up on the web! You can find it at http://www.thechoreographyexchange.com/ or click on the link at the top of the page.

We originally wanted the site/company to be called "Choreography Exchange," but that title in a .com was unavailable. Instead, we had to add "The" to the title to match the website. It's a good thing that we have yet to get a business license. We are waiting to get the license until everything is actually up and running- you know, functional.

Not to toot my own horn, but I know how to design a website, and I have a vision on how our site should look, trouble is, I don't have the skills necessary to get it there. I can do basic html and I'm proficient at Dreamweaver, but there are some technical skills that I have not acquired and don't care to spend the time learning them.

I started the website a few weeks ago, just to get something other than a bank page. I threw together a quick logo and title bar and posted it online. This is what it looks like so far.

Since I uploaded this onto the site, I have spent hours putting together the rest of the site. I obviously have not put that up. Why, you ask? It is nothing like the vision I have. Links don't work consistently and colors are off, not to mention I have no idea how to code for some of the things we need to accomplish on the site. I gave up. Time to find a template or hire someone to do it for me.

Template: Lunar Pages, our site host, has some awesome tools for design and templates. Both free and for a charge. Once you are logged into your home page, there are countless tools to help you get setup- including email, bill pay and tutorials. This is what you would see on a typical Lunar Pages setup screen.

The templates are effective, easy to edit and well organized. However, they didn't do enough. I needed a page where I could allow customers to upload their own content and allow other customers to pay for and download that content. Very complicated. I did find out that Lunar Pages offers design services and template help. After choosing your template, you could hire Lunar Pages to "help" with some of the more technical aspects when modifying the page. Convenient.

Web Designer: The other option is hiring a designer to do the entire page. You can hire them to do just the design or do that plus upkeep. I didn't need the upkeep, so hiring someone would be a little less expensive. In my case, hiring someone would mean that I could not only get the page working how I wanted, I could also have it look the way I wanted, which is very, very important to me.

The design of your Website sets the tone for what you want to accomplish and the type of people that will be interested in returning to you site. While the content has the overall importance, color choices and layout can effect whether or not people browsing stop and take and interest in the content. Likewise, The Choreography Exchange is a site that is meant to sell a product. Organization and content are key. Organization comes with good design, content is worth of its own post.

Highly recommended site to visit for personal website design:
Thought Lab
Finer Design
Turbo Nacho

Templates for sale:
Build Your Site
Templates Box

This a timelapse video showing the design of a webpage. In two minutes you can see what usually takes hours.