ISV Kaizen

As I wrote before, we want to keep the ISV Kaizen Blog free from hard selling and don’t write much about our own products except occasional references where appropriate. In every post I try to give some useful information that can help you improve a certain aspect of your own business. Through this blog we aim to build strong and long-term relationships with our colleagues: ISV, software developers, architects and marketers, technical writers, editors and journalists, designers, and other IT professionals.

Nevertheless, every 4-6 months I post a digest of the most important news about our company, Indigo Byte Systems LLC. This allows you to know more about us and to see that the blog’s topics were taken from real practice and experience, not from books or universities only.

So, here it is - the summer news from Indigo Byte Systems.

The Time Limited Special Offer:
Only this summer, the Dr.Explain will help you reinforce your IT business after recession.

Our recent market research proves that many IT companies who have survived in the recent financial recession, nowadays are working hard to release new products by the upcoming Fall 2009 to save their businesses and to get sales back.

They are working on a tight budget and with limited resources trying to cut the development and release costs as much as possible. They gave up bonuses, expensive offices and cars, and even free coffee for developers.
The software documentation is an obligatory part of any IT project and it also cannot be scrapped… but we can help you with it!

To support our colleagues we’ve dropped the price of our best-selling small business bundle “Dr.Explain Advanced License - Office Package” that allows you to install up to 5 copies of the Dr.Explain documentation tool in your company.

If your company deals much with software documentation writing then don’t miss this unique chance to get professional tools for special prices

Joint partner news :
TBS Cover Editor 1.7 released

Our fellow partner, True BoxShot Software, has recently released a new version of its amazing TBS Cover Editor - a full-cycle tool for creating 3D boxshots and virtual cover images from scratch.

What’s New in Version 1.7

Specular highlight
A specular highlight is a bright reflection from a light source and it provides a strong visual cue for the shape of an object and its location with respect to light sources in the scene. Now, in the TBS Cover Editor it is possible to specify the intensity of a specular highlight shining on a 3D object.

Reflection Effect
Now, you can use the new reflection effect for every layer in your design with possibility to adjust the offset of reflection, the opacity, and the length.

Bent 3D Screenshot
It is clearly self explanatory.

Printing the cover
In the new version it is possible to print a designed cover on printer with basic mark ups on edges, thus you can even theoretically make a sort of real box with scissors and glue.

Download the new version and give it a try!

Make us your friend

If you use social bookmarks or networks then I’ll be happy to join your network. Feel free to add me as a friend on the following networks:

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/zhuravlev

StumbleUpon: denniscrane.stumbleupon.com
Digg: digg.com/users/cognitiveforce/
Reddit: reddit.com/user/cognitive/
Delicious: del.icio.us/cognitive

If you use Dr.Explain software, please add it to your social bookmarks. Thank you!

Have a good summer!

This post is a brief digest of most important events in our company for the past several weeks. In order to keep this blog mostly self-hype free I summarized all our news in a single short post.

Dr.Explain 3.1 release

We’ve recently released the new version of our software help-authoring tool, Dr.Explain 3.1.

This update is a great step in the product history. Until the version 3.1, many software developers and vendors have been using the Dr.Explain to document their Windows software, HTML pages, or Flash (SWF) applications.
Now, the Dr.Explain 3.1 enters the Java world. Java developers can benefit from the same technology, and automatically generate professional documentation for their Java applications made with Swing components.

Besides the support of Java applications, Dr.Explain 3.1 brings more new functions that will help software vendors produce astonishing documentation even faster. The customizable capturing scenarios allow to precisely specify which window element or HTML tag to analyze or to skip, how to handle its child elements, and how to name and to annotate it. Other gems of the new version are new graphical effects and image rendering technology. All screenshot images, callout lines, text label fonts, shadow and blending effects are drawn with high precision which leaves no chance for fuzzy edges, making documentation illustrations look clean, realistic and nice (beautifully clear).

More info: www.drexplain.com

New Dr.Explain forum

If you have questions, concerns or ideas regarding the Dr.Explain software and if you want to discuss it with other users or with Dr.Explain team publicly then I invite you to join our forum at: http://www.drexplain.com/forum

ISDEF 2008

This week I, Dennis Zhuravlev (a.k.a. Dennis Crane), the CEO of Indigo Byte Systems, will attend the ISDEF 2008 conference in Moscow, Russia. If you attend this event also then I will be happy to meet you there.
There are lots of possible reasons to meet me there:

• To ask questions about our products (Dr.Explain and TBS Cover Editor (on behalf of TrueBox Shot software)), our company, or me.
• To receive a discount coupon
• To know what new projects we’re going to launch shortly
• To tell about your products or services
• To discuss a possible venture or partnership
• To offer a topic for this blog
• To trade something
• To give or to take an interview
• To chat about software, business, sport, politics, or large hadron collider
• To take a shot of beer, brandy, vodka, rum, whiskey, tequila, juice, tea or coffee
• … or just to say: ‘Hello, Dennis!’

If you’re going to ISDEF, please let me know via e-mail or comment. I’m looking forward to meet you on ISDEF 2008.

How to stuff your software product website with content attractive for search engines? What to write about besides the product features, download and order pages, and contacts? Here is a brief list of ideas to get started.

1. Press release archive
2. Product news
3. Blog
4. FAQ & How-To
5. Knowledge base
6. On-line forum
7. Product live tour or demo
8. User testimonials
9. On-line manual
10. Trouble shooting articles
11. Product use cases
12. Sample project list
13. Freebie add-ons
14. Industry statistics and news overview
15. Periodical research reports
16. White papers
17. On-topic articles
18. Press kit
19. Specials and discounts
20. Awards and in-press reviews
21. Review of complementary products and services
22. Product comparison charts and tables
23. Your interview to somebody well known
24. Your bio or your company profile and history
25. Site map

Happy New Year to everyone!

It’s 2008! Have you updated copyrights?

Wikipedia is one of the most visited resources on the Web. It’s built by people and for people. Many people from all over the world are looking for specific information on Wikipedia. The information they are looking for may be related to your software product.

Why not to turn the Wikipedia’s readers into your web site visitors and then into new users of your software? Link your web site from Wikipedia and receive several dozens of targeted visitors per day for free. Bellow, there are some hints how to do this.

Do it for people, not for search engines
Google seems to ignore incoming links from Wikipedia when calculating Page Rank for your web site. So it’s useless to link from Wikipedia to increase your Google Page Rank. There is no SEO in it. The main goal is attracting real people, not SE robots.

Start little
If your software product is popular then somebody likely has always created an article about you on Wikipedia and put a link to your web site in it. If your product is quite young and there are no articles about your software then you may look for articles that are relevant to your niche and add your link into References or Extras sections of them.

Observe the rules
Lurk for a while before adding your links into every article. See what links are appropriate and what kind of web sites are linked from Wikipedia. Try to add your link into a single relevant article first and wait for a couple of days to see if moderators accept or remove your contribution.

Monitor your competitors
Search for your competitors mentioned in the Wikipedia and try to add your plug into the same articles.

Be extremely relevant
Don’t add link to ‘ABC Super Audio Player’ into an article about ‘Jazz Music’. Otherwise, moderators will remove your contribution and may even ban your IP to prevent from future irrelevant contributions.

Link to information, not to infomercial
You can hardly add a link that points to the main page of your commercial product web site. I’m sure it will be rejected. You must give people really valuable information, not pure advertisement, and you must give it for free.

The appropriate information types on your website to link from Wikipedia are:
- Troubleshooting articles and white papers
- Statistical reports and analytics
- Freeware or open source tools and utilities
- Knowledge bases and How-To
- Tutorials
- Free on topic e-books and pod-casts
- … etc.

Name the link properly
The link title must be also relevant to the article topic. Look how other links are titled and name your one accordingly. Try to avoid directly mentioning you product in the title. It should not look like an ad.

Keep these simple points in your mind and you will see that being on Wikipedia is an easy way to get additional free and targeted traffic for your web site and, therefore, to increase the popularity of your product.

If you decided to setup a forum on your company or product website then the most annoying question is likely: “Initially, my forum will be empty and will look silent. This will deter people from joining the community. What to do?” As a moderator of several forums, I’d like to share a tip regarding the question.

Initially, don’t create too many sections. While your forum isn’t very popular each section would contain just a few posts and overall the forum would look inactive.

Create just a couple of general sections and have all posts there. So, these sections will be active and, therefore, the whole forum will look alive. Later, you may create more focused sections and move the appropriate posts there from the general section. Thus, the newly created section will be immediately filled with many posts and will also look active.

This simple trick will help you quickly spin up your forum and build a community around your product with minimal efforts.

This post is written by our special guest, Sergey Petrov.
Sergey is a CEO of SoftLogica. The most known software titles by SoftLogica are Backup Platinum - a powerful backup program for Windows OS, and Handy Recovery - a data recovery software that restores deleted files or files from deleted and formatted partitions.

After many years in ISV business, Sergey knows many secrets of how to succeed in the market. Today he unveils 8 reasons for acquiring a separate domain for each software product.

Separate domain for each product or one general site? I think it’s fair to say that I’ve participated in discussions on this topic several dozens of times.
Now all my considerations should be brought together, so that they can be referred to easily.

Type-in Traffic: If your product becomes somewhat popular, sooner or later some clients (at least, out of mere curiosity) will type in the browser’s address bar www.product.com. So why loose such a “delicious” traffic?

SEO: Firstly, if a product name contains a keyword from its niche, the domain name derived from it will give some added advantage. Secondly, all website pages will targeted to a specific niche.

Design Freedom: Different products may require different market approaches, including differences in site structure, colour spectrum, layout etc. Is a “universal” design worth loosing efficiency?

Anamnesis: It is much easier to keep in mind one entity (a product name) than two (a product name and a company name). As for me, I could hardly recollect vendor names for the heaps of software that I use every so often. It may seem that a user doesn’t need to remember a URL consisting of two entities, that is, it’s enough to remember just a company name. But it is well known that every extra click results in loosing visitors.

Analytics: It is much easier to analyze a separate site than a part of a general one. Any superstructure makes visitors’ behaviour hardly predictable.

Link Building: Sometimes a website allows placing links only to a homepage, and doesn’t allow placing links to other pages. In most cases the problem can be solved, however, it will require additional efforts.

First impression: A man is an emotional being in many respects. Therefore, a good suit and a necktie produce an impression on people even before they get acquainted with you. Thus, imagine a reseller hearing with half an ear a product name and\or catching a glimpse of URL in a printed material: he’s already had the first impression about your product.

Scalability: Perhaps, some day you’ll decide to sell a product and the related stuff “in gross”. Will it be possible to deliver everything to a new owner without loosing some integral parts?

Thanks for sharing this, Sergey!
Here is another interesting article from SoftLogica.

Some time ago I heard the gossips that Google doesn’t “like” web sites with newly registered domain names. Google likes old domain names with long history.

But … the domain history is not the only important factor. The future of domain is also important for Google ranking. If your domain registration expires in a couple of months then Google may have doubts if you are serious about your domain name and may slightly lower your web site rank. If your domain’s expiration date is far enough then Google thinks that you have serious long run intentions regarding your business and your web site. So, it may slightly increase your rank.

Most likely it’s just another urban legend. But who knows … This time I’ve renewed my domain names for two years, not for just one year as previously

Tracking is a king in mISV business.

When somebody downloads a file from your website you must log the event. Therefore, you must invoke a script (e.g. download.php) on your server that will write the info about the event in a file or database and then will redirect the visitor to the actual binary file.

In the same time, using script as a download link is not practical because many software archives do not allow links to php/pl/cgi pages, only to the exe or zip.

To overcome this you may use .htaccess file for redirection.

If you use http://www.site.com/download/abcmaker.zip as a public download link then the sample string for .htaccess can be:

Redirect /download/abcmaker.zip http://www.site.com/download/download.php?product=abcmaker

and the download.php must contain something like:

<?
...
//logging info to file or db
...
header("Location: /download/abcmaker_1421.zip"); //link to real file
?>

As you see this approach allows also to change the actual file name on the server while all incoming links may still point to http://www.site.com/download/abcmaker.zip

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 your web site in different web browsers and check if your logos, screenshots and artwork are clear and glamour. The website images appearance depends on the image file formats. There are three standard formats for website images: JPEG, PNG, and GIF. You should use each format for different purposes.

Today I’d like to tell about the common mistake of freshmen designers - using inappropriate image format for their logo or screenshots. I met this situation many times. The simple demonstration bellow shows the specifics of using those three formats for logo picture.

Using JPEG format
Although JPEG offers good compression ratio and allows using high color palette, it affects the picture quality. The better compression means the lower quality. If your image consists of monochromatic areas with sharp bounds then using JPEG format will make your picture “dirty” and inaccurate. That’s why JPEG is often good for photos rather than for logos, screenshots and artwork.

If we’d use JPEG for the logo picture on our Dr.Explain website then it would look inaccurate.

Not good, right?

Using PNG format
PNG is a very useful format indeed. It offers high color palette support, good compression ratio, transparency and doesn’t affect the quality of the picture. PNG images look clean. The format is perfect for screenshots. Nevertheless there is an issue that sometimes makes PNG useless for web design. Web browsers may display PNG images in slightly altered gamma, especially if the picture uses transparent alpha channel. So, if you use PNG image in conjunction with other design elements its borders may be visible and the whole design will look like patchwork.

If we’d use PNG for our logo picture then its borders would be visible on the gradient background in some browsers.

This is not perfect also.

Using GIF format
Although GIF format supports only 256 color palette in most cases it’s enough to display your artwork without loosing the quality. Of course you must adjust the picture palette in image editor first to select the right colors. It’s better to use the same color table for all elements of your website design to make the it seamless and solid-drawn.

We do use GIF format for our logo to make the header graphics seamless.

It looks perfect, does it?

Conclusion … Please recall this post when you’re making a new design for your website. Choose appropriate image formats for different graphical elements… or hire a designer