Would you host your website with a company whose offices look like this?

I don’t really know what to think about this. Many “serious” companies I’ve delat with in the past provide crappy service although their offices are sparky clean and they don’t do silly things like consume enough alcohol to get evicted. On the other hand it does seem ensettling that the company that you rely on to keep your data safe behaves like a college fraternity.

I did write about them however as others have done and that’s got to be worth something. After all, there’s no such thing as bad press, right?

I haven’t posted too much here lately and for a good reason. Arik and I have been hard at work to release the first public beta of our test management service called Testuff. Developing software is hard enough when you have plenty of resources but when you are a one- or two-man shop with limited funds it’s even harder. We’ve built Testuff to help small companies and mISV’s like ourselves manage and run their software tests. We’ve based it on the SaaS model so you don’t have to install any servers, but we also made a rich desktop client for it so you could enjoy a better user experience. If you’re doing any sort real development for actual, breathing clients, you should try it out.

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It’s been a week since the public release and although we made some marketing efforts (like this post) we’re still not getting enough traffic to our site. Only a few people have actually downloaded and tried to use our application and I think there’s only one name on that list that I don’t know. I realize we should be doing more marketing and getting the word out to as many people as we can but I don’t seem to be able to get past my perfectionism. I’m looking at Testuff now and it is (aside from some bugs and quirks) a fine achievement. It is quite convenient, rather pretty and has some really cool features like recording the video of the application you’re testing so you could reproduce the bugs with ease. However, since I’ve been working on it for so long, I’ve gotten u sed to all the cool things by now and I am already cultivating a new vision in my mind. A cleaner interface, less features, a faster bug video recorder, an ability to email a test to your friends who could run it and report the recording of the bug directly and so on. I’m struggling because I’ve promised my partner I’d write emails to some key figures in the micro ISV world (people like Bob Walsh, Eric Sink, Joel Spolsky, Ian Landsman and Andy Brice). But how can I describe the wonders of Testuff to them when I’m already thinking about the next version and the one after it?

Another thing I’m worried about is the fact that although every developer and QA I’ve talked to was very excited about Testuff, very few have visited the site and tried it out, not to mention started using it on their own team. Price shouldn’t be an obstacle as we’re giving it out for free right now and I don’t think there is a lack of need for a service like this. Something is amiss however and I still haven’t figured out what it is.

I’d love to hear any thoughts you may have on the subject and any advice you might have. You’ll probably need to install Testuff to do that (Ha! Gotcha!) so you’d better head on to the Testuff download page.

… Strata lets you access and manipulate data from pretty much anywhere on the web.  It’ll let you work with HTML tables, RSS Feeds and CSV files natively in tables.  And then once you have the data, you can do all sorts of ad hoc analysis, such as creating calculations, sorting, filtering, creating queries and reports — similar to the kinds of things you might do with a desktop database or a spreadsheet. 

That sounded interesting enough, although I had no idea what it might be useful for, so I went to the site to see. It’s a nicely designed site, easy on the eyes and with very obvious access to two of the most important pieces : the screencast and the download. I watched the screencast, which was also very professionaly done and downloaded the software. The software itself has some usability quirks, but it’s a first public beta so we’ll forgive the folks.

But after going through all those steps I couldn’t figure out what am I supposed to do with it. I mean, the site is nice, the movie is well done, the program seems to be thought out, but why haven’t anybody tell me why whould I need a specialty data browser.

The list of benefits on the site didn’t help me either:

• Access Data From Anywhere
• Integrate Data From Across the Web
• Manipulate Data Quickly
• Create Reports Easily
• Customize and Extend

Alright, so I can do all those cool things with data. What data? Why data? Why would I ever need to do something with data I find on the web? It’s not like the proposition doesn’t sound reasonable. We all like data, at least the geeks among us. We probably manipulate data everyday, and most of it comes from the web. But for the life of me, while reviewing the site and the application, I couldn’t come up with a single example.

Fast forward about three weeks and I wanted to do some research about the development outsource market. Specifically, I needed to know the number of active developers listed on www.rentacoder.com. They have a nice statistics page, but alas, it’s a table. Hmm.. how am I going to compute the sum of the “Coders with completed projects” column?

Finally I had a use for Kirix. I downloaded it again, installed it, browsed with it to the stats page and got the data I needed. And then a thought came to me. Wouldn’t it be much nicer if I could do that right from Firefox? All I needed was to copy the data from the table to Excel and I could do all the computing there in a familiar way.

A short search came up with Table2Clipboard, a nifty Firefox extension that lets you copy an entire table or just a bunch of cells in a format that can be pasted into Excel (should work for OpenOffice Calc as well, though I haven’t tried).

Just hold Ctrl and select the cells you want to copy dragging the left mouse button. You can also use Shift+Click to select a range of cells without dragging.

When pasting to Excel, use the Edit > Paste Special > Paste as text command, otherwise Excel might not parse the data correctly.

I finally found out what I might need Kirix Strata for, but I also came to understand that doing analisys from web data is a rare activity for me and that there is a much simpler solution to my needs. I used to think that market research is something you don’t need to really do when creating a small mISV. But it seems that it’s important after all. I imagine that if the folks at Kirix were to do their homework, they would determine whether there is a need for their product, and if so, what specific niche they will be filling.

Obviously, I’m not the kind of user they had in mind.

This post is part of a series of posts based on the fine lecture given by Dr. Roni Horowitz of www.internet-marketing.co.il at the Israeli CEO forum on May 31, 2007 in Herzlia, Israel.

I’ve talked about conversion rates in the previous installment and how it is vitally important to realize that getting people to visit your site is only part of the issue. Getting them to do something when on your site, whether it involves purchasing your shiny product, opting in for a newsletter or adding your RSS feed to their news aggregator, that is the real thing you need to be worried about. Having a clear unambiguous site is a first step in that direction.

Mistake 2 – So what do we have here?

When a potential customer comes to your site, the first thing she tries to understand is what it is you are trying to sell her. Even if she came to your site because her best friend recommended it to her as the ultimate place for blueberry pie recipes, she will be usually very confused unless it says somewhere in a prominent position on your site that you specialize in blueberry pie recipes.

As a case in point, take a look at www.plimus.com. If you haven’t heard of the company before, you will be hard pressed to understand what is it that they do. The “Simply Better E-Commerce” tag line seems to indicate what business they are in, but the rest of the site doesn’t give you any more clues. The first paragraph of text on the site is also quite opaque:

A risk-free, flexible turnkey solution with the power to increase revenue and create new markets for your software.

Yeah, okay, that wasn’t written for me, because that isn’t even English as far as I’m concerned.

Plimus is actually a successful payment processing company. They provide the means for businesses to collect payments for services and products and have some unique offerings like the ability to adjust their purchase to the style and graphics of your site. But their site doesn’t say any of this and you wouldn’t stay there to find out even if you were actually looking for a payment processor for the amazing task list management software you’ve just finished polishing up.

So, you want your conversion rates to be higher? The first thing you need to do is clearly explain what you are and what you do, and do that without confusing the audience.

Another, more subtle example of missing the point is www.applicure.com. The site is rather nice looking, has a clean design and a nice stock photo, but what do they do? You have to read the entire first paragraph of small print to find out:

Protect websites and intranet applications against hacking and web application attacks. dotDefender is a software-based web application firewall providing dedicated application security.

Nothing in the slick graphics, the logo or the tag line gives you any hint. Free your IT for business. What is that supposed to mean? And the nice lady stretching over half the site’s real estate, what does she have to do with anything?

Applicure do tell you what they are about, but it’s still not obvious enough. They could do better.

I went trough quite a few of the sites that I frequent to find one that’s actually clear about its purpose. www.tadalist.com seems to be a prime example. The first thing you see is the “Make lists and get stuff done” tagline. That’s it. You know what the site is about. You know whether what they have is something you might need. And if you do, you’ll stick around to read the fine print and find out why 37signals thought there’s a place for yet another task management service on the web.

Whatever else you decide to put on your web site, don’t confuse your visitors. Make your purpose clear. That will, at the very least, guarantee that they stay around long enough to understand why you are much better than your competition and possibly be convinced to move some $$ from their pocket to yours.

Part 2 >>

This post is one of a series of posts based on the fine lecture given by Dr. Roni Horowitz of www.internet-marketing.co.il at the Israeli CEO forum on May 31, 2007 in Herzlia, Israel.

You might be surprised at the title of this post if you know me or read some of the posts on this site. I’m a programming geek with some UI design skills who had, until recently at least, no real interest in the “darker” side of the software business. Starting your own company however, makes you think differently about many things, marketing being among the first.

I just came back from the Israeli high tech CEO conference. I’m not a CEO and don’t aspire to be one in the near future (I was listed as a CTO at the conference, and even that is a bit far fetched for a two-man not-yet-a-company), but I did enjoy one lecture in particular whose contents I would like to share with you.

Dr. Roni Horwitz was presented as the foremost Israeli expert in the field of Internet marketing. I was quite skeptical at first, but his lecture on the 10 most common Internet marketing mistakes was informative and very much to the point. His primary audience seems to be Hebrew speakers, so if you read Hebrew and want to read it from the man himself, please refer to his site at www.internet-marketing.co.il.

This will be a small series of posts, one about each common mistake.

Disclaimer : This series of posts is my interpretation of Roni’s lecture and I take full credit for all the mistakes and bad jokes herein.

Mistake 1 : Internet marketing = Traffic

Many people believe that the chief goal of Internet marketing is to get people to their site. They employ all manners of SEO techniques and spend tens of thousands of dollars a month on advertisement without realizing that they might be digging themselves a deep financial grave. While traffic is important and you need to generate enough of it, the real challenge is generating enough customers from the traffic to cover the advertisement costs and to generate profit. Lets take a look at two imaginary sites, foopoop.com and barbags.com. Both site sell packages of small blue plastic bags for collecting dog poop to help their customers avoid prosecution for reckless shoe endangerment. Both sites charge an outrageous though mathematically convenient $100 for a package of the bags. They each use various SEO techniques and buy Google AdWords and spend about 75 cents per visitor to their site. The two sites however, differ on the conversion rates. One in every 100 people who visit foopoop.com buys a package of their smell resistant bags (a 1% conversion rate) as opposed to only one in 200 for barbags.com’s double-thickness bag (a much lower %0.5 conversion rate). You don’t need to have finished MIT with honors to figure out the meaning of this: foopoop.com earns 25 for each visitor while barbags.com looses the same 25 cents every time somebody visits their site! If the folks at barbags.com don’t realize that and keep trying to get more traffic to their site, they’re just digging their own grave deeper and deeper with every visitor.

There are ways you can improve your site’s conversion rate. Changing the fonts, the colors, the wording, or just repositioning some elements on your site might do the trick. Experiment with your site to improve your conversion rates and you won’t get buried under a pile of dog poop.

Read about the most important thing you should pay attention to when creating your site in the next installment.