Today, October 30th, is an exciting day for Lakeview! Our worship team, Lakeview Worship, has recorded a live worship album approximately every year since 2001. I was deeply involved with the earlier projects even more than the recent ones; that was years before I started working for Lakeview. Each of the CDs was produced and released in-house, and all of them went around the world in really amazing ways.
But this CD is the first one released worldwide, in 166 countries I’m told, under the Integrity Music label. The idea is, most stores carrying Christian music will likely carry our CD. It’s called Make You Known, and there are 30 second clips from all the tracks available where it’s for sale on our own Lakeview Worship website. I just turned the new Lakeview Worship online store loose today after converting it over to a new shopping cart system. The entire website is getting a facelift soon, but the store was redone in time (barely) for the new CD release. And now that I’ve given you behind-the-scenes information you can’t get anywhere else (on the web), you’re going to buy it, right? Or, just click the Listen Now link to hear the clips. Aren’t you thankful I’m telling you this way rather than the email-a-friend link at the Lakeview Worship site where the person sending the most emails gets an iPod Touch? ‘Cause I’m not… ;-)
Hey, I can’t get the store to show up in Mac’s Safari..
Hmmm…such are the perils of band-aiding a design that’s over three years old. I’ll see if I can at least test and get someone working on that during daytime hours. I know it works in Firefox on Windows, and Firefox is reasonably consistent from platform to platform, so if you have Firefox on the Mac I’m guess it will work.
Can you be more specific about what’s not showing up?
Nothing in IE6 or Safari on Windows either… just see the shaded background… no content. On the page to send emails… there is no text labeling the boxes… not sure if that is intentional nor not. (Firefox)
Side note… that iPod Touch doesn’t look quite right… http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch/.
Thanks Eric…I’ve fixed the form labels (although the designer will need to redo them to make them look a little better; at least they’re there now). And I’ve pointed out the iPod Touch issue :-)
I’m going to work on the Safari and IE6 issues today. And thanks to Mark for pointing out the Safari issues as well, I neglected to thank him in my comment above, right before I went to bed!
The Listen Now link now works in the store; thanks to Nick for emailing me about that! Still a ways to go to get the final kinks worked out, but making progress!
I see you are using E-junkie for the shopping cart, can you provide some details about why you chose to go with them?
Andrew,
Yep. Cheap, easy, simple. Dropping links into the site is all we have to do and they host the cart, which is generic and keeps people on our site until time to checkout. It’s also very user-friendly solution that offers a lot of payment method options. They also do digital downloads with instant delivery and download count tracking, and they integrate with Google Analytics. They’re also relatively inexpensive for a hosted solution.
If you have any comments or feedback, or know of better services, I’d love to hear it! I looked at a lot of hosted carts and was unimpressed with either the complexity of the admin interface or the “clunkiness” of the shopping/checkout process. e-Junkie also lets us release a shopping cart now with our current design temporarily, and easily switch to a new design for the whole site and store when we have that completed, without much hassling with shopping cart templates.
I don’t have a better recommendation, the integration with E-junkie looks slick and simple. Nice find!
Update for everyone: IE6 and Safari should work now. There was a nice runaway comment that I found and closed :-) Also, the store now has a link to view/preview/purchase the new CD on iTunes if you would prefer a digital format!
The text labels on the homepage popup are still blurry and the iTouch image isn’t 100% correct yet, but those are graphical and not functional, and are out of my control at the moment (the proper authorities have been notified).
Thanks again for all the comments!