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A new feature idea for my kids program

Looking at my usage data, it looks like people don’t like my program and / or they aren’t finding what they want.

The most popular keyword phrase on my site printable masks.

So I’m thinking that people are actually wanting to produce printable masks from my program without having to build them.

So I could simply provide a lot of saved mask files or a random button which loads on of these files.

I guess I could make the feature a bit more acctrative and show a big selection screen, however I would also lock the masks which use the face parts they havent got a license for. I think I may do this already.

I know Blue said that this seemed silly, to add yet another feature without proof that it would actually work.

Thoughts?

by JM

2009 03 06 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (0) Permalink

Summary of my usage data

I’m not going to name my program here, but you guys will know that its my kids programs.

I’ve analysed my uninstall usage data and have produced some stats shown below. I haven’t included stats from bug reports, which I haven’t got round to yet.

The summary is based on all 880 reports from the last release in July.

I’m hoping you guys will comment on my findings.

Reason CountOfReason
(Please select) 774
Other 33
Just didn’t like the program 33
Trial expired 14
Found it too complicated 14
Had a problem 10
Missing an expected feature 2

So theres not much of a pattern there, except that users couldn’t be bothered to select a reason.
————————————–
Whether they were willing to enter into a competition to win a license.
No 796
Yes 84

This didn’t require people to provide an email address, provide comments etc.
————————————–
OS CountOfOS
XP 772
VIS 100
98 6
23K 2

I think I’ll drop windows 98.
————————————–
I haven’t yet analysed my Max Reached Point information, I do have stats but I haven’t look to see where these point are in my program. I hope to do this before the end of the thread.
————————————–
DaysInst CountOfDaysInst
0 540
1 43
3 31
2 25
4 22
7 18
— Snip —

So most people use the program for less than a day then uninstall.
————————————–
MinsUsed CountOfMinsUsed
0 226
2 115
3 68
4 44
5 49
6 30
7 30
8 24
9 26
10 12
11 20
12 14
13 21
14 9
15 9
16 12
17 6
18 10
19 3
20 14
— snip —
99 25

So that varies.
————————————–
ProgRetryCount CountOfProgRetryCount
1 365
2 173
3 104
4 56
5 33
0 33
6 28
8 16
7 13
9 12
10 8
11 6
12 5
14 4

So users do close the program and retry it.
————————————–

Crash CountOfCrash
No 843
Unc 33
Yes 4

So not a massive percentage of crashes.
————————————–

PrintBtnUsed CountOfPrintBtnUsed
N 737
Y 143

This is how many people used the print button.
I guess I would hope this to be higher.
————————————–

PrintsLeft CountOfPrintsLeft
0 95
1 6
2 7
3 10
4 25

From people who did print.

by JM

2009 03 02 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (9) Permalink

Strange SERPs results

As I wrote a few days ago, SoftwareLode has been disappearing from Google search results. I did have 3500 pages in the main index in mid-January but over the following weeks most of my pages were dumped from the index and my visitor levels crashed. Whereas I was making a good $5 a day on Adsense I ended up being lucky to make $1.

The strange thing was though that for keywords on the homepage I still did well. For “Free DVD Software” I was still on page 1 and for “Free Software Downloads” I was around #40. In the last week though, I started disappearing for “Free Software Downloads” too. For the last 3 days I didn’t appear anywhere for this keyword in the first 1000 results.

Today though the trend is reversing and all of a sudden I have 100 more pages in the main index than yesterday. The other good news is that I’m doing better than ever for “Free Software Downloads” – I’m at #27 on google.co.uk and #19 on google.ca. This compares with SoftTester at positions #49 and #68 respectively on .co.uk and .ca. Why SoftwareLode is higher than SoftTester I’m not sure.

2009 03 01 MikeL Search Engine Optimisation Comments (3) Permalink

What project to work on next?

Over the last year or so, I’ve been trying to manage my time better to give all of my projects time. However, I’ve tried to put the big earners first, but still give all my projects some of my time.

I haven’t done any work on my kids program since July and I have millions of bug reports and uninstall questionnaires to wade through, then summarise then fixes to make.

It not so much that its been shoved to the bottom of the pile, more that I’ve felt that other project never get any time where it did use to get a lots.

Now I’ve not got any great hope that my kids program will suddenly start to make a lot of money. However I still do sell licenses for it every so often.

Should I work on it now?

by JM

2009 03 01 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (10) Permalink

Form Editor/ Designer

Lately, I’ve been working towards a forms designer that can be used with a new version of my main software.

form designer

The idea is to let people freely edit their own invoice templates to suit their own business. A fair percentage of people seem to want modifications, e.g. in the colour of text, or they want to add new images and fixed text. This new forms designer should let customers do all these kinds of things very easily. I’m also going to let people adjust the widths of columns as well as add new columns. We do use a version of the template editor in-house to do custom modifications for people for a fee. This brings in a little bit of income but we think that if people could edit their own templates we’d probably get a lot more customers. The thinking is that if 1 in 10 customers asks us if templates can be modified, a lot more must simply reject the package and choose a competitor’s without getting in touch at all.

The forms designer itself isn’t specific to my main package and could be used to design forms for any purpose. It could even be used as the data output (print/ email) engine for other data sources. Any ideas on a possible use for it outside my main product line?

2009 03 01 MikeL Business Software Comments (1) Permalink

Problems with BT Broadband

Lately we’ve been having big problems with BT broadband. Once a week or so the ADSL connection drops out leaving us disconnected from the internet. We are so used to spending a few hours a day online – answering emails etc. – that it drives us a bit nuts. I’ve contacted their 0800 support line and the people try to be helpful but the only guidance they seem to be able to give is to help us reconnect our PCs to the wireless hub.

My suspicion is that there’s a couple of problems. The first is that when someone else in my village uses broadband, the ADSL link goes down, i.e. we interfere with each other. In Window’s list of available wireless connections, I often see another wireless hub when the service is very ropey. The second thing is that when someone uses a wireless telephone in the village, I have trouble connecting my desktop wirelessly to my hub. I think this is the case since I sometimes see another wireless connection with just a number like 209871245 – instead of a name.

We’ve been unable to get online for more than a few minutes in the last day. Does anyone else have broadband problems like these?

2009 02 28 MikeL Tech Talk Comments (3) Permalink

Finally…

After 2 weeks or maybe its the best part of 3 week… hmmm…

I’ve finished my in-house ordering system updates. We’ll its working, although I’ll be doing 5 minute tweaks now and again.

Been something I’ve been thinking about for a couple of years. Will make the whole process less of a chore for me and greatly reduce the amount of time I spend each day processing orders.

🙂 🙂

Also added some extra stuff to make things easier for shop site sales too.

Thing is I kind of feel deflated, I seem to have spent a lot of heavy brain usage on this and I can’t think whats next on my to do list.

I dunno whether to be pleased or upset.

Guess, as Blue was suggesting, I should have a break.

by JM

2009 02 25 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (1) Permalink

Adsense Penalty: Is there such a thing?

Since around the time I tweaked the Adsense on my software downloads site the page impressions have been dropping. The number of pages in Google’s main index has also been declining in the last month or so. I can’t pin the drop in impressions down to the exact date when I changed the Adsense but it’s within a week or so. I’m now making about a quarter of the Adsense income I was. This isn’t a big loss, since the amount of money involved wasn’t great anyway but I’d still like to get back to where I was.

I’ve been scratching my head trying to figure out whether I’ve triggered some sort of Google penalty or whether, since the site is only 7 months old, the site is still doing the usual new site dance in SERPs.

I went and read Google’s terms of service for Adsense and couldn’t really see anything that I was doing wrong. There is a vague warning about breaking the terms of service if the site is purely constructed for the purposes of showing Adsense. If this was my problem though, every download site would have the same issue.

The clause that caught my eye though was one saying you shouldn’t have more than 3 ads per page. I had upped the ads/ page to 3 but on my work computer I sometimes got a strange “can’t show page” panel appearing below the ad tower on the left of the page. I didn’t see this at all on my home computer so I thought it was just a firewall issue or some other weird problem. The company I work for is a large American corporation with big paranoia about security and spends more on firewall protection than they do on the server. Quite often Google ads won’t show at all on some websites.

However, it suddenly occurred to me that there might be a bug in my PHP script. I took a look and found a cutdown Google ad script sitting below the proper ad script for the tower. This might have been taken as a 4th Google ad on the page and may have triggered a penalty of some kind. I’ve now removed the script fragment. With any luck my traffic will return over the coming weeks as the Adsense robot reindexes the pages.

2009 02 19 MikeL Adsense Comments (1) Permalink

Marketing via new toys for my CD software?

I’ve finally made some progress with my new licensing functionality for my maths cds.

I can now accept a few of the users details along with a 14 digit numeric key, all of which I will print at the bottom of the customers packing slip. Thus making my life tonnes easier as I can create cds before I get the orders and not waste tonnes of time, when I’m busy.

I haven’t really touched the code in the program since 2006 and therefore I was a bit unfamiliar with it. However, the code I have now added provides me with room for some creative marketing.

Firstly, the program only use to work with a license key file, which I included in the setup exe file, re-generated at order time for each CD. If the license key is deleted, they are given a 30 day trial period. Obviously not something a paying customer would do; also not something I’m really worried about, if someone were to want to try and copy my program and use without the key file.

However, this functionality does give me the option to provide users with a period, perhaps a trial or a grace period. My initial thought was to give customers maybe 5 days before they have to enter the key. Then I thought, why should I do that, I’ll just lock them out if they don’t enter the key etc.

Now, I’m thinking a little about the marketing side of this, if I give people a 5 day grace period / trial and market the cd, so that people are allowed to pass on to their friends, I could get some extra sales.

Secondly, I’ve kept in my first licensing strategy which either accepts a key file (as provided when i use to burn a cd per customer) or more interestingly, to accept a key block provided as provided by ShareIT online.

So I could add a button to my paper license acceptance screen, something ‘Help Options’ which would show a screen with radio buttons. Options could be, A) help me enter my paper license info (I’m an Idiot), where I could send them a license block over email. B) Purchase a new license online via ShareIT. C) Maybe purchase a new CD.

Maybe I’m getting carried away with all these extra toys?

I’m just not sure what to do?

Also how to term things, like grace period, trial, etc, after all it might upset customers who have bought the CD?

Lots of questions.

by JM

2009 02 12 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (4) Permalink

Security license code enter by customer with their address etc?

I’m about to develop a new licensing strategy for customers who buy cds. The customer will get their packing slip / invoice with a box at the bottom of the page, with their details (name, address, email address) and some sort of license code. The idea being that they have to type the contents of the box into a matching screen in the program.

My issue is how secure will the licence code (shown in the box) be? I mean it has to be tied to the the customer detail and the product itself.

I don’t want to make this process too difficult. Although it already sounds a little difficult. Also, I don’t want to make the code too long.

I do think its worth putting a degree of effort into this, otherwise anyone with a programming language could easily figure out how to build the code.

I don’t like Blues approach were he gives people a key, I definitely want to tie in their personal details.

Thoughts?

By JM

2009 02 02 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (2) Permalink