One of the biggest hurdles facing e-business start-ups is ensuring the webmaster or online store owner remain motivated. It's not always easy to make an online store and to keep it running, or to stick with it long enough to ensure its financis. It takes time tal succeso build website traffic, and to transform that traffic into sales and a loyal customer base for a new e-commerce website. And it can be disheartening to have spent time and effort to make a website with an online store, only to be rewarded with an empty bank account and a trickle of visitors.

Though it's vital to stick to a plan and to do whatever it takes to remain motivated as your online store grows, there are a few essential things you can do to give it a really good start, and to ensure you develop a successful e-commerce business.

Monday was a pretty big day at the office. First there were the usual "how was your weekend" and a whole lot of "what, you still don't have an iPhone 4?" to get through. After that, there was the new free website maker (your site manager) to get out the door, or rather up and online. It took the better part of the day (it was heavy) but we finally sent it on it's way, and the consensus at the office is unanimous: we like it ... which isn't that surprising.

However, if the feedback we've received over the last couple of days is anything to go by, apparently so do you, our member community of beginner webmasters and experienced web designers alike. Well, we're just tickled pink to hear it, and we're all feeling pretty chuffed.

In this, the third installment of our series exploring the updated doomby site manager, we'll be checking out one of the central pillars of our website builder: the redesigned free website development tools. The changes we've been making have been motivated in large part by a desire to make it easier than ever to make a website. As a result, we've spent a lot of time reworking the general manager layout and the individual menus to ensure you spend less time looking for things and more time getting on with the business of website creation.

How do we know you're going to find it easier to use doomby's website builder? Because these are changes you've suggested!

Work is continuing at a feverish pace on updating doomby's free website maker to bring you a refreshed, revitalized and reworked manager for your website builder ASAP (that'd be next week, providing the coffee keeps flowing). As I mentioned last time, our website builder tools are currently getting a major overhaul to make your website management even easier than before. Today's tour of doomby's new and improved free website builder tools explores the website manager homepage and it's enhanced management and site monitoring feature set: the dashboard.

As I mentioned yesterday, the doomby site manager is undergoing a pretty radical facelift at the moment, in order help you make a website easier than ever before. We also thought it was about time we brought the visual design of your site management and web page builder tools into line with the public doomby website design. Today, we'll take the first of our tours behind the scenes of your updated free website maker tools, to help you familiarize yourself with the new site layout.

First up: site navigation. As you can see from the screenshot below, your new website manager is radically different (visually) from the current interface. Yet once you've familiarized yourself with the main changes to the menu layout, you'll soon feel right at home.

I really have to hand it to Apple, and not just because they have mastered the art of simple and effective website design. Lately, their very excellent marketing team has given me a good run with the word “magical”. I don't think a single day has gone by in the last month that I haven't been reminded of just how “magical” the ordinary can be.

Bus is on time? Magical. Shirt doesn't need ironing? Magical. Hair that's stopped growing? Magical. Water from a tap, toilets that flush, shoe laces that tie … magical, magical, magical.

Yes, just like certain advertising execs, I too have a slight tendency to exaggerate things at times (and to overuse already-overused words ...), but I promise you that what follows is no exaggeration: your favorite free website maker is about to undergo a transformation that really is magical*, and will completely change the way you make a website.

It's been a few weeks since we released the new doomby video gallery, making it even easier to make a website that rocks, complete with your choice of video content. But if you were thinking it just couldn't possibly get any simpler to publish your video content with your favorite free website builder, you're in for a big surprise. Yes, we've got some great news for those of you who aren't fans of YouTube, or are looking to extend their search for jedi cats beyond Google's immediate sphere of influence. You can now import videos and expand your video gallery with content from Dailymotion as well. And if that isn't enough, we've also added a few extras and tweaked some existing elements to make what was already amazing … truly magical.

In spite of the pretty major hurdle represented by a missing API (apparently it's important), Sid* has came up trumps yet again. The resulting technical triumph means you can now search for and import Dailymotion videos to add to your website, without leaving your site manager.

Getting busy is easier as the weather warms up (sorry southern hemisphere friends), and now is as good a time as any to start to make a website, or to spring-clean your existing one. Whether you're just starting out or already a seasoned webmaster, you'll always need to be thinking on several fronts as you create a website and develop your content. Obviously, your website design is an important part of ensuring people stick around long enough to get to the good stuff: your killer site content. But you also need to keep these two elements in sync with the way people actually use your website.

Getting a site looking great and filled with fascinating stuff is next to useless if people run away in frustration just after they arrive – your visitors need to be able to find content and navigate through your website as easily as possible. Keeping your site content, its aesthetics and ergonomics in balance is one of the keys to dealing with a bouncy website.

In the race to be Google's best friend, having less bounce to the ounce helps. Among the many criteria that are (allegedly) taken into consideration by Google (and presumably those other search engines as well …) is a website's bounce rate.

It's rare these days that you come across free things online that are genuinely useful. I mean, sure, there's free stuff that's also neat, handy or interesting (like jedi cats). But little of what you'll find online manages to combine usefulness and gratuity, without you running the risk of ending up with a hefty fine, jailed, or both. Unsatisfied with that sad status quo, today's Earth-shattering doomby annoucement is our response. Today, we're giving you something for nothing that will actually make you money, won't see you in jail¹, and is super-useful². Ever since our e-commerce solution came out (you know, the thing you can add to doomby's free website builder to make an e-commerce website that rocks), we've been all like "ohhh" and "awww" (but you hadn't noticed, right?), because we've been really pleased with what we developed. Well, we like it so much that we wanted to share it with everyone. Free. Yes, now everyone can create a website and make an

online store, and rest soundly knowing it won't cost a dime.

Call us crazy, but we were partly inspired by the vertiginous drop in the euro, figuring if we didn't make it free, the new peso of the north would soon be at a level where – for the price – we'd practically be giving it away anyway. So that's just what we decided to do.

I have a confession to make. I've been stumbling around the doomby directory quite a lot over the last six months, and not everything I've seen has left me dumbfounded (with joy). My mother (like all mothers) probably thinks about me in pretty much the same way I think about the websites I've come across in that time. Whilst I'm proud as punch of every website I see – I'm truly, genuinely pleased to see people choosing to use our website builder tools to make a website – I'm not always overjoyed with the end result.

Of course, it's every webmaster's right to create a website exactly as they see fit, which is just as things should be. Part of what makes building a website such an enjoyable and enriching experience is the creative process itself, no matter what the end result looks like. Sometimes, though, it seems some people try a little too hard, or focus a little too much on their website design. When that happens, it can be all too easy to get caught up in the design process and lose sight of what one started out to do.