FanSite: A User-Friendly Website Builder For Small Businesses in the Music Concert Industry
September 13, 2022
By: Adam Hansen
In this day and age, having a strong online presence has become an integral must-have for any business, regardless of its size or history. However, unlike large corporations, which have the capacity to allocate entire departments to design, code, and maintain their websites, small companies do not always have sufficient resources to maintain such websites or keep the required specialists on their teams.
Today, most customers tend to form their first impression of a product by looking at its packaging, and a company website, in this case, serves as this packaging. That is why the prospects of establishing a positive relationship with a new client largely depend on how informative, user-friendly, appealing, and usable the company website is. Furthermore, the quality of the site has a profound impact on its optimization and the effectiveness of the marketing budget. For example, if a company allocates certain funds to the promotion and the website fails to attract the required number of visitors, the funds go to waste. The same holds true for the information a customer finds in free information systems. Some companies listed on these services only provide their phone number and address. It will probably be an easy choice for the client…contacting this company or the one with a website, where they can read up on everything they want to know about the product and ultimately purchase it.
As mentioned earlier, when it comes to web development, small businesses prioritize costs and delivery time. That is why website builders are becoming increasingly popular. They offer ready-made solutions with ready-to-use templates applicable to multiple business areas, allowing small companies to save on their websites’ front and back-end development; services that can easily break the bank.
If we look at the concert industry, we will see that many small and micro businesses and even individual entrepreneurs hold small-scale parties and other events on minuscule budgets. And still, these events need to somehow be promoted, and the tickets need to be sold, which leads to the only logical conclusion – a high-quality selling website is a must here.
There is a plethora of website builders out there, and yet, it is hardly possible to find templates that would work for the concert industry. Builders available today are either too general and unsuited to the concert business or extremely complex, specialized, and expensive.
The main issue here is that this business area has its own specific requirements. The site must be user-friendly and concise, while its development must not take too long so that the organizer can start selling tickets as soon as possible. Furthermore, these websites often have a short lifespan, which might sometimes amount to just 2-3 months. What does the customer want to see on this website?
- Attention-grabbing description of the event, or announcement.
- Event location.
- Event dates.
- How to purchase tickets?
It shouldn’t be an issue when organizing a once-off event – in this case, any basic web builder will do. However, if we are talking about a series of concerts or events, there must be a more versatile solution. The organizer should be able to constantly update the system with upcoming events, which, in turn, will be displayed on the main page. In addition, they should be able to create the main page for an upcoming event and embed widgets for ticket sales.
The website builder FanSite, the development of which was led by Ilyas Khusniyarov and Vladimir Makarov, is an affordable, easy-to-use specialized product tailored to the needs of concert organizers. It consists of only a few pages listed below:
Home – This page consists of several segments:
- A slide with major events, their dates, and location.
- A segment with a list of events, which can also be displayed as a table.
- An information segment with a brief description of the concert agency and social media links.
- Information on the largest projects organized by the agency.
Event page – It also consists of several segments:
- The main segment with a ticket widget.
- A segment with information about event location.
- Information about an artist/music band, an embedded popular tracks widget, and a link to their social media. The service already has a database with all artists, descriptions, and links, which makes it easier to search for and use the relevant information.
- Music videos. Here the user can find the most popular music videos by the artist.
Support – A page with a detailed description of how to purchase, return, exchange, and restore tickets.
Archive – Here the user can view photos from previous concerts.
Contacts – This page describes how to contact the organizers if the user has any questions.
The discussed service is a perfect fit for small to mid-sized businesses that covers all the basic needs of entrepreneurs in the concert industry. More importantly, it will allow aspiring organizers to kick-start their career in this business without spending the majority of their initial capital on an expensive online project.