The Business of Software

Hi folks --

I am at the stage where I am having people beside friends and family try out my program--call it "early beta". I'm still learning, but I think my biggest target audience will be middle/high school teachers and college professors.

I think my web site is at the same early beta stage:
http://www.PerformanceGradebook.com

I have started the process of getting a logo and better graphics, for example. I would love any feedback you'd like to give me.

Thanks, as always -- Al C.

"Click to enlarge image" didn't.

Weird font in the Download Now button.

Lost interest after that... nothing personal, just not my niche.

1) Your Screenshots on your homepage should at least be cropped so not to lose their quality.  At this point, they are so grainy and blurry I can't even tell what they are supposed to represent.  (Are these screenshots part of a "background"??)

2) Your Buy / Download buttons have borders around them.  Is that on purpose?

3) The "Buy Now" page has a "Download" button with no prices or information about purchasing.

4) Is there a way you can "show" the problems and solutions instead of using a lot of text?  But I'm not sure the text is a bad thing.  I don't know your audience's purchasing process.

5) By singling yourself out as the creator and seller, you may be limiting yourself to just the teachers who don't mind buying software from "this guy on the web who created a neat program."  Again, maybe this is what teachers are looking for, I just don't know.

I like the site overall.

I can't speak for teachers who are on their own with respect to grading, but as the administrator of a high school's technology program, I'd rather have a web-based SIS.

If you enter the grade data into a system like Centre ( http://www.centresis.org/ ), then parents can see how their children are doing and the report cards can be generated from the teacher entries.

So ...

Do you have a strategy for allowing the data from your application to be exported to a centralized system?

Do you have a marketing message that calls out the benefits of a desktop application versus a web application (works on your commute)?

Boy ... that sounds way more critical than I meant it to!  Please don't take it personally, just think of me as your devil's advocate.

I like how the application looks.

The website needs some work, specially the fonts.

Thank you all for your feedback.

@Greg -- Another person told me the images wouldn't popup. The popup behavior is controlled by a JavaScript file. Do you know, off the top of your head, if you have your browser set to prevent JavaScript popups?

@Greg + @Javier -- I assume it's the font in the title and buttons you don't like. I chose it because I thought it was only slightly different from what we usually see, combined with the fact that it looks a little boxy & my app is made of grids and boxes. Clearly, my thinking here was off. ... I may need to change the font.

@Ben -- I hear you re: the screenshots. I think I'm so close to the application that I have an attitude of "People have to see the whole screenshot, otherwise they might miss something important!" Do have any suggestions for which part of the screen to include in the cropped images?

And re: pt #5 -- Point well taken. I worded things as I did just to be honest. Perhaps I'll think about trying to reword in a way that's equally honest, but promotes the product better.

@Steve -- Don't worry about sounding critical; I appreciate the feedback, especially from someone who works in a school. I recognize some schools use the more centralized systems you are talking about, esp. larger schools. I don't have the background to compete with those kinds of grade management systems. I guess I'm aiming at a different market niche. I like the point about the morning commute, though.

Alan,

My feedback for what it's worth, feel free to disregard as you see fit :)

Congrats on getting your app near to completion.

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The first and most important point : You mention getting friends and family to take a look and that you were a teacher, have you had any actual teachers use Performance Gradebook yet ?  Any that weren't family or friends ?  Have you posted asking for feedback in teacher forums ?

If not this is task #1.

Google for "I am a teacher" or search search.twitter.com for "marking papers" and find someone who is a teacher, offer them a free license for their feedback.  You may have to do this 20 times before you find someone who will actually give feedback.

If you cant find someone in the target market to take a look for free you will have a job charging for it.

It may be tempting to think that you know the domain, that you and some members of your family or friends are teachers and you have a good idea what teachers want. 

This is dangerous,  once you start selling you will need to find teachers you don't know out there to buy, so start now, and find some to take a look. 

Listen very carefully to what they say, you may be suprised at different marketing angles that appear.

</speech over>
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1 - The "Performance Gradebook" text logo at the top of the page is poor, it's hard to read and looks amatuerish.  Also the light blue background doesn't really go with the light green menu bar below.

2 - Some of the writing on the site is a little clunky.

"Grading is a never ending task, and almost no teacher really likes it."  I would rewrite as "Grading and giving individual feedback to students is tough and time consuming but vital to help student reach their potential. "

Instead of telling them how their job sucks and they don't like grading, tell them they are on a mission to help students. 

3 - Third party "trust markers" are very important.  There is a term for this but I can't remember what it is.

Getting a quote '"Performance Gradebook saved me time and improved my feedback to students" - Mrs Jane Smith' up makes a big difference.

4 - Using chrome the click to enlarge doesn't work. I use the javascript library highslide for this.

5 - I rename 'Screencast' to 'Example Video', screencast is jargon.  The video doesn't show up in Chrome for me.

6 - Having the download menu item automatically download is a good idea, having the contact menu item automatically link with a
href mailto to my email client is not.  When I click a web menu item I expect a webpage to load, to suddenly have Outlook start up, when I don't
even use Outlook is annoying.  Make it open a webpage that says "Email us at ..." and have the link on the page.

7 - The learn more page looks to have good content, but it's perhaps too much text, could you throw in a few small images to break it up.
People take a look at a large block of text and think "Do I want to commit to reading all that ?".  If it's in smaller chunks they are more likely to
start reading

Cheers
Sam

I would get your own domain instead of using a hosting company's sub-domain.

@Sam -- Thanks for the lengthy feedback. I'm in the process of doing most of what you mentioned in the "speech" section. I appreciated what you had to say, though. I think your point 3 goes along with this.

I made changes in response to 5 and 6.

I guess I may need to invest in highslide; someone else mentioned it to me a few weeks ago. I was trying to save $$, although I am aware there is a certain hypocrisy in saying I want people to pay for something I made and then going out to look for free software for my own use ... If the non-free option works better than the free option, it might just be worth ponying up a few dollars, eh? :-)

I own a license for Highslide. It's a good little library, but if I were to do it over I would consider the scrollable gallery with tool tips using the jTools plug-in for jQuery:

http://flowplayer.org/tools/demos/combine/scrollable-gallery-with-tooltips.html

ooh that's nice.

1)  Big Bright Pancake Download Button.  Above the fold.  Ditto for the buy now button. 

2)  Your design is confusing and lacks a focal point, probably owing to the checkerboard orientation of the walls of text and the screenshots.  I'd strongly suggest using a better template with a two-column layout, where one column got the main content and the other got the supporting content, like say buttons and links.

3)  PerformanceGradebook.com should not resolve to http://colburnsoftware.nfshost.com/ .  This issue has SEO implications.  Fix it and fix it *fast*.

4)  Important enough to highlight: 

>>
Getting a quote '"Performance Gradebook saved me time and improved my feedback to students" - Mrs Jane Smith' up makes a big difference.
>>

5)  You talk a lot about I, I, I.  Your customers want to hear about them, them, them.  Count up how many times you use any variant of "I" versus any variant of "you": the second should vastly outnumber the first. 

6)  That paragraph where you gradually build up to the problem needs to get itself fed into the woodchipper.  You know how nobody reads on the Internet?  To the limited extent that people are not-reading your site, they are not-reading that paragraph.  Get straight into the meat of it with something like:

Bold the *starred* bits.

Individualized feedback is key to education, but providing it for a classroom of students takes too much time and prevents you from doing other important tasks.

PerformanceGradebook is gradebook software that *saves you time* assessing and recording the grades to rubric-based assignments.  It allows you to provider *better feedback* more consistently in *half the time*.    [Adjust claims to match what your users report.  If you don't have users yet, make your best guess based on your own experience.  I quote 45 minutes to make bingo cards for a class on my website -- turns out most of my teachers actually took more.]

7)  Your customers are not all that technically inclined.  Help them out: Does this work on my Mac?  Does this work on my PC?  (They might phrase that as "Does this work on my Dell?".  Frequently.) 

8)  You will be amazed how well teachers respond to the word FREE.  Even if it is just Free Trial.  For example, Download Free Trial. 

9)  "Downloading things is scary, because this ol' computer is on its last legs, and anyway I might get a virus!"  She's scared of you.  Present reasons why she should not be scared of you.  ("I am a teacher" is one good reason.  I have a professional looking site with a logo that doesn't look like ClipArt from 1996 is another.  It doesn't have to win any design awards, but it has to look like something she expects that scam sites do not look like. 

10)  Every uISV starts with the same five page website and for whatever reason one of those pages is always the screenshot page.  If I could do one thing to change the standard Five Page Template Website, I would change the screenshot page into the Extended Narrative Of Why You Want To Use My Software page.  There might be photos stuck in, but only to the extent they help tell the narrative.  "Gradebook view" doesn't tell me anything of use -- what am I doing in the gradebook view that implies value sufficient to cause me to download or purchase this software?  Tell me the narrative!

11)  Does your software let you save and load rubrics?  And download them from your website?  You're going to want that feature, going forward.  It gives you an easy option to publish (or cause to be published) a virtually limitless stream of activities/assignments to your website, which is probably the best SEO trick you'll ever hear from me.  I can expound at length on how powerful this is if you're not convinced.

Hi Patrick,

Thanks for taking the time to review my site so carefully. Your feedback, along with others who responded, is going to make a major difference in the site.

I've addressed #3, know that #4 will come with further testing, and #11 was in the works, too. I've also started looking for professional graphics assistance, so the site won't have that "1996 clip art" look (LOL).

I think I'll take the 'Learn More' section, which people seemed to find wordy for the web, and combine it with the screenshots into a new section. I'll try to write phrases about how the program helps users, with a relevant screenshot next to each phrase. And I'll keep in mind the points you made about user sophistication and reluctance to download for fear of viruses, etc.

Thanks again. The site will soon be much better.