Archive for April, 2007

On-line Software Help Planner tool to quickly draft your software help system

April 25, 2007

If you deal with software development business then you likely have ever dealt with software documentation writing. Next time, when you are about to create or revamp a help system for your software start from this free on-line tool, Software Help Planner. It will advise the most suitable help system architecture for your software product. [...]

Posted in Documentation | No Comments »

Choosing negative words for your AdWords campaign

April 21, 2007

Andrew Brice on JOS forum shared an idea on how to get your negative keywords set up correctly in AdWords to maximise your campaign’s ROI. Along with common practice of server log analysis he suggested to search for all your key AdWords terms at http://search.live.com. The ‘Related searches’ will show the phrases irrelevant to your [...]

Posted in AdWords | 6 Comments »

Another way to improve project-oriented software

April 20, 2007

There are many software products that have a project-oriented concept. In other words they allow creating, editing, and managing projects or documents. The examples of the project-oriented programs are various text and media editors, database systems, spreadsheets, programming tools, setup builders, knowledge bases, and a lot of other applications. I’d like to gift you an [...]

Posted in Application, Distribution | No Comments »

Make support requests more informative

April 18, 2007

When a user emails to you a feature request or an issue report you may not realize if he uses the latest version of your product or not. Maybe he simply must download an update to resolve the problem or you really must fix the bug in the newest build? Today, I’d like to tell [...]

Posted in Support | 1 Comment »

Help the people start using your software earlier

April 16, 2007

This post is inspired by a recent discussion in the ASP groups. It was noticed that most of software don’t offer users an option to immediately launch the program in the end of setup process. After installation, users have to locate the application shortcut manually in Start menu among dozens of other software groups. You [...]

Posted in Distribution | 1 Comment »

Clear up your graphics

April 13, 2007

Many novice (m)ISVs design websites for their products themselves. The home-made design allows the quick and low-cost getting started. However, if you have no experience in web design there are lots of non obvious peculiarities that you have to know to make your website attractive. One of the most important things is graphics. Look at [...]

Posted in Presentation, Website | 3 Comments »

Keep your web pages PR by eliminating weak outgoing links

April 11, 2007

I bet you want to improve your website position in the search results on major search engines, primly on Google. Being seen in the organic search results is the good way to receive the stable targeted traffic almost for free. That’s why you have to continuously improve the Page Rank (PR) of your pages. Everyone [...]

Posted in SEO, Website | 4 Comments »

Introduction

April 11, 2007

Recently I’ve read a couple of books by Masaaki Imai about Kaizen, the philosophy of ongoing improvement without spending much money. I think the Kaizen model perfectly describes the business of small independent software vendor. Due to lack of resources a small ISV is usually unable to make big investments into innovations to quickly expand [...]

Posted in Miscellaneous | No Comments »