SONG LYRICS SEARCH

Mission Statement: Become a leader in the online music lyrics industry by providing a professionally designed and managed site that is free, user friendly, accurate, and endless in its quantity and quality of lyrics. Further more, to achieve this without annoying, deceitful or intrusive marketing practices, ever!

1. Customer experience trumps all. Without any customers there is no database of lyrics, without a database of lyrics there is no web site. Listen to the customer, engage the customer with the site, enlist the customer's help, and build a long term relationship of trust and mutual assistance.
   
   
2. Never, ever, not even once use invasive marketing techniques. No pop-ups. No ad ware. No spy ware. No viruses. No pop-under pages. No doorway pages. No deceptive redirects. No spam. If it seems like it could be annoying. Don't do it.
   
   
3. Be accurate. A lyric site that provides the user the wrong lyrics is almost as worthless as a music lyric site that covers you in spam. Put processes in place to self-correct the site based off of user feedback.
   
   
4. Maintain the focus of the site. This is a lyric web site first and foremost. All other features of the site should build upon the basic principle that customer are on the site to find lyrics.
   
   
5. Enhance the user experience. What else do users want to see on a site that is dedicated to music lyrics? Offer those things and do so in an unobtrusive manner to enhance the overall customer experience.
   
   
6. Build a community. Everyday there are hundreds of thousands of users looking for lyrics to their favorite songs. Capture their attention and respect so they choose to join the Lyric Vault community.
   
   
7. Be marginally profitable. A music lyric site that is bleeding money won't be able to offer the community their services on a long term basis. Find ways to make money while upholding the Lyric Vault principles, and then reinvest a portion of those profits back into making the site even better.
   
   
8. Be a friend to the music industry. The music industry is a powerful organization that demands respect. Offer products that will enhance their marketing and advertising efforts to improve their profits. Help them to succeed so that Lyric Vault may succeed as well.
   
   
9. Brag about the Lyric Vault site and technology. This isn't a site that should be kept in a closet. Tell everyone about the site via as many reasonable advertising methods as possible and always remember that your users are your most valuable advertising collateral. Make the user's experience proper and the advertising they can do for you will create a better return on your investment than any other method.
   
   
10. Never say it can't be done. Perhaps it shouldn't be done yet, but it can be done-if not now, technology will make it possible in the future. Hang on to the ideas that seem outrageous today as tomorrow they may become quite reasonable.

Lyric Vault's concept started in September of 2005 when the, soon to be founder, Brent D. Payne did a Google search for the lyrics to Nickelback's latest song Photograph. The result of the search led him to numerous music lyrics web sites that were filled with unwanted pop-up banners, annoying flashing banners, and-in extreme cases-adware and viruses. The designs of most of the sites were unprofessional, not user-friendly, and frankly just not worthy of being part of the music industry. It was then that Brent decided he could 'do it better'.

During the next few weeks the business backbone of Lyric Vault was established and the name of Lyric Vault was chosen. Brent enlisted the programming skills of Allen Garner a PHP programmer he had been introduced to by his uncle, Doug Yoes. Allen Garner was very generous in his financial arrangements knowing that Lyric Vault would be funded entirely by Brent D. Payne, versus venture capitalists or other partners that may not be as customer focused.

The Lyric Vault site still needed a sleek appearance so as Allen Garner worked feverishly on the heart of the sites features and funcionality, Brent turned to Chris Wheeler the owner of http://www.solodelux.com for assistance with graphics design. Considering the concept of Lyric Vault was little more than just to have a professionally designed and managed web site for consumers to find lyrics, Chris Wheeler was left a blank slate (too blank if you were to ask Chris) to work with for the site. The general concept at the time was to have an artist page, album page, lyrics page, search results list page, and a home page. The sectional layout of those pages would be in a modular fashion so it could be reused as needed for use on other pages within the site. The efforts of Allen Garner and Chris Wheeler resulted in the flexibility that this new Lyric Vault site needed to quickly build modular pages and adapt to future changes.

During the month of November 2005 the design elements were slowly integrated into the backend database elements of the site. This included numerous changes and then even more changes on top of those numerous changes. The site had to offer the right features, maintain a professional design, and be scalable for not only the small site it was at the time but the enormous database of lyrics, songs, albums, and artists that was envisioned.