Name of your website?Unique Performance Volleyball
Your name?
John Sutton
Your Location (city, etc)
Peoria, and Central Illinois
Please give us a short summary of your website?
Our website provides information on Peoria, IL area junior volleyball, and includes information on Unique Performance Volleyball and its multiple volleyball activities including: USAV and JVDA Club Junior Volleyball Teams, Private Volleyball training, Volleyball Clinics, and more.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
We thought the website would provide a great place for area volleyball athletes to find information and for players to uplaod their volleyball profiles and resumes for college coaches to view.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
We first launched our website in october of 2007. It was pretty much the same as it is now, but with much less content. We recently added the profile, calendar of events, and much more.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
It was easy, we are called Unique performance Volleyball, and Uniquevb.com gets that across and is easy to remember.
What makes it different from other, similar offerings?
I think our content and profiles are things most other volleyball websites don't provide for their players. The profiles have proven very useful for recruiting, and for getting information on the coaches out to potential players.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
To provide information to Peoria, IL volleyball athletes, and grow the sport of volleyball through high performance training. We hope to icnrease our teams by 3 times next year.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
I think it has been pretty cost efficient to run the website. It helps cutdown on the amount of printing our club does, and time wise, it is pretty simple since we use a CMS system (Joomla).
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
I would definitely have more photos to go with our content. I plan on doing this and adding more features such as frontpage slideshow soon.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
I believe so, we use 1and1 for our hosting, and I think they have options that could meet demands.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
Joomla is a complicated and buggy system at times, it has been a struggle to kep up to date with all the great work that comes form open source software, but all in all the website ahs been a great help to our program.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Biggest challenge for Unique Performance in general has been getting players to actually utilize all the features our site provides.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
Flyers to HS coaches, and current players. We also focus on SEO and our blog.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
None, I do this for a living, so i knew what to expect.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
2 months...I will keep it up and up to date as long as the club is running.
What do you offer that Eastside Volleyball Club does not?
Unique Performance Volleyball is in a different venue than Eastside. While Eastside does an excellent job with it's younger developmental teams, Unique is focused on our elite Royale travel teams. We have the best volleyball coaches in the area, including top past collegiate players. We believe our training systems is something Eastside can't match....but only competition can decide the winner.
What is your website address?
Unique Performance Volleyball
