Letting the cat out of the bag

I've been overly busy with my consulting work for that last week and 1/2 so I have not commented on a post by Joel Marcy about his product ideas. He had a teaser post a few days before describing his goals for the first year of his uISV. He also posted over at BoS announcing his ideas as well. As usual there was some good feedback from the group.

His three ideas are RSS Desktop Reader, Fantasy Football website, and tools/utilities for windows. He breaks down the tools that will be in the grab bag. The one that jumped out at me was the Outlook add on that makes sure you have an attachment on the email before you send it. I've always thought this would be a great tool. It turns out there are some like this anyway, but Joel is going to make his tools free. I'm using web clients for most of my email currently, but I will recommend the tools to some people I know once they are ready.

He is going to focus on the Fantasy Football site first. The business model is advertising. I have mixed feelings about it. With the advertisement model, you need lots of users to make any money. But the costs should be pretty minimal which is very important when using the advertisement business model. The odds are it will take a while to build up the user base to get to a point where you are making any money off the advertisements. So you need to bootstrap for quite a while until you reach the break even point. But if you have very low expenses, you can afford to keep things running while you build up the user base.

With a subscription model (like Web Work Schedules) I only need 2-4 customers to pay for all my monthly expenses. That said getting people to pay directly to you is a lot more difficult than having them use your information site for free.

So congratulations to Joel for letting the world know about his ideas. As I had predicted, no one crushed him for saying what his ideas were. No comes the more difficult part, the execution. I'll be following his progress on his blog and hope he is successful.

Usability - trimming excess white space

I've noticed one thing with applications and it is beginning to annoy me. If you send me an email with a string that I need to paste into a form (on the web or in a desktop application) you should know by now that there is going to be an extra space at the end of it. I don't know the point in history when applications started including that space when you try to highlight a word, but you know it is going to happen, so check for it and remove it.

Actually for any input you should do this. For example if you ask the user for a URL, where you know that it is not valid for the extra space to be there, simply check for it and remove it. Don't tell me that the URL in invalid and make me paste the same string again and then delete the space myself.

This small usability issue will make the overall user experience better and it is one line of code to trim off the excess white space.

uISV Class 07 - December Grades

I'm going to run WebsiteGrader each month to do a status check on us and see how we are doing. Here's how were were doing when I initially ran it last month.

Here are the results for this month:

Site	Score	Page Rank
chatspring.com (was steplively.com)	31	0
http://www.thinklife.co.uk/	40	3
joelmarcey.com	48	4
http://www.smallfarmcentral.com/	76	4
http://www.sportavista.com/ note1	N/A	N/A
http://www.sendalong.com/	12	0
catchthebest.com	76	0
http://www.heliumfoot.com/	39	0
http://www.lokad.com/	95	4
twistedwave.com	73	5
http://www.omnicustomersupport.com/	35	0
http://www.webworkschedules.com/	28	0
http://www.sixproducts.com/	30	0

I noticed a major issue of using www in the urls. In particular catchthebest.com vs. www.catchthebest.com and twistedwave.com vs www.twistedwave.com. I know google treats those as different sites, which is why you need to have a redirect in place. I also noticed that WebsiteGrader also treats them differently. For Catch The Best, the score difference is 76 vs 58 and 73 vs 51 for Twisted Wave. To keep it consistent, I'm using the URL that I get directed to if I go to the site. So the URL in the table is the URL I used in WebSiteGrader. This also affected the reported PR score. Also the following warning is displayed for the Google Page Rank scores on the report page:

Note: The Google Page Rank is dependent on external sources and may not be reported correctly. If you receive a Page Rank of 0, the rank may not be accurate.

The highest ranking was Lokad with a 95 still, second month in a row. The best improvement was joelmarcey.com with an 8 point jump.

Gentle nudge to Jon of SendAlong to update his meta-keywords and description tags and I think we would see his score jump 10-20 points based on my own experience.

So that's it for this month. I'll run them again next month.

Note 1: WebSiteGrader was unable to run on
www.sportavista.com. There was no errors when I ran the report, but I'm able to browse to the page, so I'm not sure what the issue is. The big concern here is that Google and others may be having a similar problem that WebSiteGrader is.

Updated 12/10 - Aded Ian Howson's blog from www.sixproducts.com