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.

Let me start this installment with a quote:

Our company is the leader in its field. We provide up-to-par turn-key solutions to enterprise-grade resource allocation problems thus improving both your ROI and TOC and allowing your company to be prepared for the challenges of tomorrow. Join us in our quest!

Care to guess which company is this or at least what business it is in?

You can’t actually, because I lied to you. This isn’t a real company’s marketing pitch I quoted, though it sure sounds like one, doesn’t it? I’ve just written it up in 5 minutes with the help of a couple of bullshit generators to illustrate a point.

Mistake 3 – Writing for the CEO

We’ve all seen, read and heard those statements from all manner of self-proclaimed experts, consultants and incompetent CEOs. It’s even worse if you’re living in a non-English speaking country like here in Israel. People seem to crap all over their message with English words within a Hebrew text to make them sound smarter. We all know it doesn’t.

We still do it sometimes, and usually have an excuse along the lines of “But that’s what the CEO wanted”. You aren’t creating a web site for the CEO. You aren’t doing it for the CMO either. You aren’t even doing it for you. You’re doing it for your vistors who might become paying cutomers. Your marketing messages is probably something the CEO’s ego should be left out of.

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.

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.

Had a conversation today with a guy I work with about reading blogs. He never read any (weird, hah?) but seemed interested and wanted to know where he should start. I wrote him an email with some of the blogs that I read on a daily basis and thought you might benefit from those pointers as well.

Many people in the software world have at least heard of Joel Spolsky of JoelOnSoftware. His recent material is a bit weak, but the archives are a great source of insights on software development, architecture and business. He’s also published most of his articles in a book which my business partner dubbed Joel on Toilet. Yeah, disgusting, I know.

I’ve always been quite interested in the configuration management world and Eric Sink is a guru in the field. He’s also one hell of a hacker and an accomplished business man which makes his blog a gem.

The Daily WTF (which stands for Worse Than Failure although the usual meaning usually works just as well) is a constant source of amusing stories of programmers and other technical people f***ing up in huge ways. Very entertaining read, especially when you find yourself thinking, oh shit, that happened to me too.

If you think that you want to go on your own and start a company, but just looking for the right motivation to do that, you should read Paul Graham’s essays. He claims that any decent hacker can and should start a startup, and he’s even willing to put some money where his keyboard is via Y Combinator, a company that he founded that funds startups in the earliest possible stages.

Raymond Chen probably knows more about Windows internals than any other man alive (except maybe for Mark Russinovich of SysInternals). His blog is full of insights about programming for Windows and historical explanation for things like Why are console windows limited to Lucida Console and raster fonts?.

For my Hebrew speaking readers I would also like to include two blogs in the Hebrew language I read on a daily basis:

Cognitive Dissonance has some deep articles on how philosophy and math relate to everyday life.

The Glob is a quite amusing take on the everyday events in Israeli politics and media.

That’s it for now. I haven’t written anything for quite a while being busy with several projects that run in parallel. I’ll tell you more about the more interesting parts of what I’m doing in future posts.

If this were an actual serial number site, you browser would now be attacked by hundreds of malware scripts. It’s not. Go away.

If you do have an installed Visual Studio 2005 however, and want to find out the serial number you’ve used to install it because you don’t have a clue where you put that shiny sticker, you can. It is, like most things in Windows, in the registry.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Registration\PIDKEY

In order to convert the value in that key to an actual serial number you have to put a dash ( – ) after evert 5 characters of the code.

Enjoy and don’t do anything illegal with this information.

[Update] Almost four years have gone by since I posted this and it is still a magnet for guys looking for Visual Studio 2005 serial keys. Comments are now disabled and removed.

I’ve just finished reading Stevey’s latest. His quite long essay (that was apparently written in under an hour) is about the features he believes we will see in the next language that is going to take over the world. What he describes sounds like magic. A language with Lisp’s expressiveness, C’s speed and Python’s cleanliness. Well, not exactly, but more or less in that spirit. Here’s a summary of the attributes he expects to see in the Next Big Language (NBL):

Rule #1: C-like syntax

This is because programmers are lame, but hey, it’s your target audience. Give the people what they want.

Rule #2: Dynamic typing with optional static types.

Adding in optional static types is the ideal solution. It helps with performance, it helps with code reliability and (possibly) readability, it helps IDEs navigate your code, and most importantly, it helps combat the incredible FUD that dynamic languages inspire in people who come from static backgrounds.

Rule #3: Performance

Generally speaking, NBL will have to have a much greater focus on performance than so-called “scripting languages” have had in the past. I mean, if it’s really the Next Big Thing, it’ll have to run on mobile devices, game platforms, and all sorts of other hardware-constrained devices.

Rule #4: Tools

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say they wouldn’t use Ruby because it lacks automated refactoring tools. Ruby doesn’t actually need them in the way Java does; it’s like refusing to switch to an electric car because there’s no place to put the gasoline. But programmers are a stubborn bunch, and to win them over you have to give them what they think they want.

Rule #5: Kitchen Sink

Here’s a short list of programming-language features that have become ad-hoc standards that everyone expects:

1. Object-literal syntax for arrays and hashes
2. Array slicing and other intelligent collection operators
3. Perl 5 compatible regular expression literals
4. Destructuring bind (e.g. x, y = returnTwoValues())
5. Function literals and first-class, non-broken closures
6. Standard OOP with classes, instances, interfaces, polymorphism, etc.
7. Visibility quantifiers (public/private/protected)
8. Iterators and generators
9. List comprehensions
10. Namespaces and packages
11. Cross-platform GUI
12. Operator overloading
13. Keyword and rest parameters
14. First-class parser and AST support
15. Static typing and duck typing
16. Type expressions and statically checkable semantics
17. Solid string and collection libraries
18. Strings and streams act like collections

The most disturbing thing about his post is the insinuation that he has some inside information that leads him to believe he knows what that future language might be. I tried to guess what he was talking about while I was reading and couldn’t come to any conclusion. None of the languages I’ve worked with (C++, Java, C#, VB.NET and Python) seem to fit the bill. They are all either too restrictive or too slow to actually become the next best thing. As much as I love Python, it was designed to be “glue” between components written in C and C++ and most of its speed-critical libraries are still written in those languages and that doesn’t seem likely to change in any near future (even with PyPy). And for a language to become truly popular it isn’t enough for it to be merely good, fun or fast. It needs to be endorsed by somebody big. As much power as we think the open source movement might have, the really big endeavors need money to succeed and that can only be provided by large businesses. And no, I don’t see a major bank’s IT department developing a Zope- or Rails- based information management system any time soon. They need someone to blame and to buy consulting from if (or more likely, when) things go wrong, so they’ll probably go with Java or .NET (or Fortran :) ).

The comments to the aforementioned post reveal a worthy contender however. I’ve never written a line of JavaScript in my life, spending most of my time creating desktop applications, but I’ve heard a lot about it being a surprisingly expressive languages with all sorts of cool language features like closures and generators. So, can JavaScript be the next big thing? It just might. Adobe contributed the sources of their ActionScript (which is the language used in Flash) Virtual Machine to Mozilla which promptly launched the Tamarin project which is going to implement version 4 of ECMAScript (upon which both ActiveScript and JavaScript are based with differences being mostly in the libraries). That version is rumored to have almost every feature listed in Stevey’s list above. If you’ve taken a look a the participants in the Tamarin project, you’ve seen that it consists of an equal number of Mozilla and Adobe (presumably former-Macromedia) people. That is a serious combination of efforts. The folks at Mozilla are serious hackers and have proven their ability to motivate a community of volunteer hackers, and Adobe can provide the financial backing and the brand that will help adoption in the suit-and-tie IT environment. That, in combination with ES4’s alleged superiority, might prove powerful enough to make its adoption by the masses possible.

But that’s not all. It seems (and I’m probably very late to find out about it), that Adobe’s Apollo project is supposed to be everything Java Applets and .NET’s Zero Deployment should have been – a secure sandboxed environment for running applications downloaded from the web to be run on the local computer with no more hazard or installation pain than visiting a web site. I’ve previously written that desktop applications could fight back the current wave of moving everything to the web. I wrote that post under the assumption that the tools for creating web applications will develop in a linear fashion through slow evolution of what we have today. And what we have today isn’t much – creating a responsive AJAX application that works across platforms and browsers is still too hard, much harder than creating a desktop application with, say, wxPython, that does the same thing. If Apollo does deliver an out-of-the-browser platform that will actually work, and you’ll be able to code to it using a language that doesn’t feel like bootcamp all over again, desktop applications will probably disappear.

And if Adobe does pull that off, they, along with their technology will become the next big thing.