The Business of Software

Following up on the thread at http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.757506.20, I have done some significant updates to my website at http://www.codebykevin.com.

Here are the highlights:

1. Since there was some confusion about my software brand vs. my company name, I retitled the software operation "Code by Kevin--a division of WordTech Communications LLC." I hope this will make the Paypal link to "WordTech" less confusing.

2. I cleaned up the "lightbox" effect with screenshots. "Close" buttons are at the top of the popup image, not the bottom, and the screenshots are also a bit smaller so they don't overwhelm the screen. This will make navigation easier.

3. Cleaning up the lightbox effect also provided me an opportunity to re-think how I use these screenshots. Since my niche is to provide shiny GUI's for Unix CLI tools, I thought a side-by-side view of typing commands in the console and pointing and clicking with a GUI would be an effective sales tool. The contrast is pretty dramatic!

4. This also gave me an opportunity to tighten up my sales copy on each web page. I made sure the words "GUI," "easy," and the name of the command-line tools were featured in the pages--I didn't do this consistently.  I hope this will improve the Google-fu of the site.

5. I added a "coverflow" effect to the front page. Instead of scrolling down and looking at a bunch of small icons in a table layout, a user can "flow" through a sliding display of big application icons with a big headline about what the app does--then clicking on the image takes you to that web page. This makes the index page less cluttered, takes up less screen real estate, and is also easy to maintain. I will be adding more apps over the coming year, and the "coverflow" effect will scale nicely with this. I also hope this might attract some of the "hip" Mac users that others alluded to.

6. While I moved my sales policies to a separate page, I didn't change the policies themselves. These policies are long-standing; I've never had a credit card-dispute with a user; and as long as I make sure the user is appropriately informed, then I feel the policy is reasonable.

Thanks to all for the feedback! I think the site is much improved, and I hope you agree. I also hope it leads to increased sales. :-)

Kevin,

Sorry but, get the older site back, those moving icons are terrible.

It looks better than 80% of the websites I visit.  The coverflow effect on the main page looks good, but it seems to be slow on my computer (maybe it is getting lots of traffic at the moment), and it took me a couple of seconds (at least!) to figure out how to use the slider control.  Sure, having the navigation frame on the right side is unusual, but the overall layout is clean, and for some people this minor difference from the "standard" might be a welcome change.  The side by side screenshots of CLI vs. GUI is very effective, in my opinion.

at least the icons are not moving by themselves :)..

I think if you had text on top or bottom of the icons on the main page it would be far more clearer right now there is a disconnect between the text and the icon and the fact that each points to a different product

The guy from http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/ uses to call this "Mystery Meat Navigation", sites that maybe look cute but are confusing to the user.

took me awhile to figure out what's going on..
very confusing way to navigate.

@Javier - that's what I was going to link to!

People coming to your home page would be better served by clear navigation and instant recognition of what the site offers. Unix users especially don't seem like the type that would be dazzled by an image carousel.

I think the coverflow widget is wildly inappropriate in this context. The only clue to what your products do is "Making Unix Easy on Mac OS X".  That is not enough IMHO.

Your home page should be telling me what you offer, not trying to be cute with trendy widgets. It is probably also a bad idea from an SEO point of view.

Agree with the sentiments of several others here - the coverflow-ish effect is cute but confusing and, well, unexpected.

Nothing wrong with standing out from the standard web 2.0 designs but the current design/navigation scheme might make me bounce immediately if I were an unsuspecting external visitor.

Why it's so slow to load? o_O (hint: try to use Pingdom to measure access time from different points in the world).

And many images are having 2x-4x bigger actual dimensions than required for the page. Why do you need to transfer extra bytes, making the load process painfully visible?

oh, common :)

http://www.wordtechcommunications.com/

http://www.wordtechcommunications.com/books.jpg
855px × 1200px (scaled to 195px × 272px)

I have to admit it was really really slow for me to load as well around 20s - I may well have clicked away in other circumstancies. I've tried loading it several times and it's takes a similar amount of time. Are you not using minified versions of the JavaScript files?

It also throws a JavaScript error as well - which kind of leads me to believe that you are not using some of the .js files that you are including. Also remember that JavaScript files load one at a time so your site literally is at a standstill until each JavaScript file has loaded.

The page also does not render correctly in Google Chrome.

Hope this is helpful.

I think coverflow is a cool effect but with only 5 products to show, this may be premature optimizing.

You could have gone with a standard two column, three row grid, leaving the lower right corner blank, and still achieved a very nice effect.  For an example, look at the new Safari 4 "Top Sites" page with six web sites shown.  (I suggest 2x3 rather than 3x2 due to the size of your icons.)  Each mini-window can then have the icon and a short description of what the product does next to the icon.

The Nintendo Wii has a similar coverflow menu structure where each screen is a grid of icons and there are prominent left and right arrows flanking the grid, to move between screens.  I personally thought that was much more intuitive than the slider control.

I really do like the screenshots.  They however should be equal size (both width and height).  I would also recommend that you go with a fixed width layout in CSS terms and center the two columns for now.  The "problem" is that when I resize the width of my window, the CLI window stays fixed but the GUI window moves.  Since the CLI window is not as tall as the GUI window, it makes me wonder if you're trying for a subliminal message effect?

I'd also try to find a better "buy now" button, one that can incorporate the actual price, and I would also duplicate both the buy and download buttons further down in the text; "buy now" should be associated with the "get packetstream" section and "download" should be associated with the "upgrade packetstream" section.

There are some other suggestions but in general, I think you're going in the right direction.  What I'd recommend now is to start looking at various other OS X software web sites, compare and contrast them, and look for patterns.  For example, I suspect many of them either do the download or the buy button but not both (which one depends on whether you can buy the product or upgrade the product from within the application itself.)