Kalzumeus Software

I am strongly tempted to take this article, translate it into Japanese, and pass it around the office, because what works in Columbus, Ohio is also very true for life in Central Japan.  Even Nagoya is more of a Detroit than it is a Silicon Valley.  (Incidentally: nobody here knows what Craigslist is, either.  Most don’t even know Mixi, which is Myspace for Japan.)

I have one of my book length pieces in the works on how uISVs, like startups, can milk web apps for everything they’re worth.  My mental title for it is “The Beauty of Being Small”.  I suppose I should wait until I’ve actually got a web app to be giving advice about how to make web apps, though.

One of the unfortunate facts of the education market is that it has pretty severe seasonality: sales drop to close to nothing when school is not in session.  I have had roughly a week without a sale now, and expect that sales will remain severely depressed until roughly August 15th (when I’m going to probably have a burst of activity — start of the new term means cash money).  Oh well, more time to improve the website, marketing, and there is that minor issue of finding myself a job by July 25th… 

I just changed my links to the default colors.  I have been told that having them other colors (they were previously colored to match my website’s color scheme — an inviting orange for unvisited links and a burnt orange for visited ones) has a tendency to confuse people who are used to the convention that anything blue and underlined can be clicked*.  We’ll see if this doesn’t make people more likely to click on the links I want them to click on.  My bounce rate is slightly higher than I’d like it to be on the front page.

On the other hand, the new buttons on the download page are performing admirably, even without having the prohibited logos in them.  You can click on the image to see a larger version of the appropriate portion of my CrazyEgg heatmap.  That Download Windows Free Trial button is, incidentally, the most incandescent place anywhere on my website. 

* Admit it, you tried to click it, didn’t you?

Edited to add: The buttons displayed in this post have changed, due to issues raised in the comments. 

When your customers are not the technically sharpest knives in the drawer, sometimes I think a little redundancy can be a good thing. Working from Oliver’s quite helpful comment on my download page redesign I decided to make some adjustments to my buttons.

My old Download Free Trial buttons:

My new buttons:

What has changed? Well, the buttons are actually the same size now (did you catch that? Eight pixels is hard to see!), I have gone to freaky lengths to make sure the common text is in the exact same places* (took about an hour of per-pixel adjustments… grrrr, it would be better to have layers in the icon editor), and I’ve added some explanatory text to make it absolutely obvious to everyone that the image is, indeed, a button. The little embossed cursor was a little finishing touch. I guarantee you 25% of the clicks on the button will hit the cursor.

* Edit to add: back to the drawing board. I didn’t realize I had flopped this up until I saw them laid out vertically.

**Edit the second: Fixed, by taking three constituent images in Axialis, exporting them as GIFs, and using layers in Paint.NET to compose them by hand. That was overkill but it saved quite a bit of time since I was using a hammer to drive a nail rather than a screwdriver — when you need images to line up perfectly, you need layers. Sorry, I sometimes get tunnel vision for little details.

It appears that the new icons I developed are having mixed results.  About 1% less people (9.5 -> 8.5) click on the download free trial button, although the overall conversion has stayed constant since the textual links are picking up the slack.  2% more people (1 -> 3) are clicking the Buy Now! button.  I’m not entirely sure whether that is a result of just the redesigned buttons or the result of changing Purchase Now to Buy Now! but either way, what can I say, I like it.  Hope it keeps up.

I posted recently about how to use Lightbox to make your web site prettier and more useable, and someone pointed out to me that it would be even better if Lightbox would let you dismiss the image by hitting the escape key.  Doing that required working around some compatibility quirks in Firefox versus IE, so to save anyone else the trouble of doing it you can just grab it from my site.

 For those interested in idiosyncracies of Javascript compatibility, here is what posed the issues:

a)  IE will let you test a keyCode against an integer, including a non-printing ASCII code such as 27 (the escape key).  Firefox requires you to test against a constant, something like event.DOM_VK_ESCAPE .

b)  IE captures non-printing keyboard keys (other than F1-F12, apparently) in the keypressed event, but Firefox only captures them in the keydown event.

Nothing to do with uISVs, but I just nailed an interview in my continuing search to find a new day job.  It certainly helps when your current boss is best buddies with the prospective new boss and the person with direct hiring authority is an ex-coworker*.  I’d like to think that my resume and good attitude during the interview helped the matter, too.

* This isn’t that uncommon in Japan.  It isn’t that uncommon in America, either, although most people downplay its importance.  The freakishly high chances that two people in a related field will again do business with each other are as good a reason as anything to be faultlessly polite and fair in all of your business dealings.

Every uISV has a screenshot page and, if you’re sane, a shot of your program above the fold on your front page.  These are generally teeny-tiny thumbnails which exist more to demonstrate the fact that there is a real purchasable product than anything else.  Of course, customers actually want to be able to read the text on your GUI, so you link that thumbnail to an image file… and bad stuff happens.

For the non-technical B2C market, “bad stuff” generally means “Prospective customer cannot find their way out of the image”.  Yes, I know, I know, they have a back button.  They may not KNOW they have a back button, though.  My screenshots, for the longest time, had 80%+ bounce rates until I figured this out.  So I’ve been using the _blank thing to pop the screenshot up in a new window, which is a decent compromise but it distracts unduly from the sales pitch.  They have to close that window to get back to reading, and I’d rather they have a visual reminder of what exactly they were doing so they don’t get distracted, switch to their email, and go away.

Luckily, there is this nice little Javascript widget called Lightbox (introduced to me by the indispensable Nick Hebb, king of flowchart software).  Add two lines of code to your web page, tag screen shots with rel=”lightbox”, and you get a shiny Javascript preview effect which is quite similar to e-junkie’s Fat Free Cart.  It grays out the rest of the page but keeps it visible, and directs your attention directly on the screenshot — a single click anywhere dismisses it, taking you back to the page.  (There is a Lightbox2 which has more sophisticated behavior which is, for my customers, a usability nightmare.  I passed.)  You can take a quick gander at the home page for Bingo Card Creator — try playing with the main screen shot to see Lightbox and the purchasing page to use the Fat Free Cart.