Across on her Blog Sue Pichotta from  AltaWebWorks has written a nice little article on spicing up your website with quality graphics and page design.

Well worth a read, given that this is something most of us suck at and that Sue has proven talent in producing.

http://altawebworks.com/articles/website-design/six-easy-changes-to-makeover-your-website

 UPDATE: I forgot to add the most important information of all…

Sue tells me “When someone places an order for the Glasso icon sets, during the checkout process, they are offered 60% off the Roma or Vistine icon sets ($20 each, instead of $49.95).  So, what that works out to, is that for the price of one icon set ($49.99), you can get all three.  $9.99 for the Glasso Icons, $20 for the Roma set, and $20 for the Vistine set.  $149 worth of icons for $49. ”

That’s a pretty good deal.  Here’s the details to grab yourself some:

Icon Set: http://www.icons-icons.com/glasso-icons.php

Coupon code:  GETGLASS

Note:  You enter the coupon code on the final order page to get the discount.  It goes on the same page as your credit card number; don’t forget to click on the “update coupon” link to change the price.

 Now there really is no excsuse to get a couple of sets of decent icons for your app’s or website.

 Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
A diplomat… is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip. – Caskie Stinnett

There are four, beautiful, sets available that have my mouth watering.

Krypton Toolkit  http://www.componentfactory.com/free-windows-forms-controls.php

Krypton Ribbon http://www.componentfactory.com/windows-forms-ribbon.php

Krypton Navigator http://www.componentfactory.com/windows-forms-tabcontrol.php

Krypton Workspace http://www.componentfactory.com/windows-forms-tabbed.php

I purchased a control set earlier this month from another vendor (ISV’s beware – when a vendor does not have a trial version of a certain component there is probably a very good reason for this…) which sadly was not as good.  In fact that particular library was completely unusable.  Compiler warnings (warnings often signal future trouble, they shouldn’t be ignored), source code not at the current version (three years old in fact) and support was non existent.

KRYPTON from COMPONENT FACTORY however is a different story!

Active support forums (and I mean active) with helpful replies from both the company and users.  Super nice components that are fast, flexible and it’s got to be said – very, very sexy.

Yes, this ISV is going to have to work out how to purchase the suite.  It’s that nice.  Of course after purchasing the previous suite, and being on a boot strapping budget, this will be tricky – short of robbing a bank. 

The Krypton Toolkit BTW is 100% free to download and use.  Extremely generous if you consider what’s in there and how much many other component vendors charge for similar components.  The other three component packs form the “suite” which is commercial, though fully functional trials exist (always a good sign).

The look and feel is extremely nice, from the UI of the office suites (such as MS Office 2003, 2007 etc) and beyond, the increasingly ubiquitous ribbon bar, navigators and the rather interesting (and tempting) workspace control.

I’m going to be spending a good deal of the Christmas/New Year period looking at how to best implement these controls into MixAction now that the other component library has turned out to be a fizzer (I had a lot UI wise riding on it, an expensive lesson, I should know better after all these years), so stay tuned for, I guarantee it 100% this time, screenshots in the New Year. 

Scott Kane

Very few however consider the basic tenets of what it means to survive, what a real company actually is and why profitability or lack thereof harms and devalues an entire industry.

A business is in many respects like the phrase sociologists use to describe the modern human family unit.  The “Nuclear Family” – or if you’re name includes the initials GW then you’d transform that through metathesis to “Nucular Family.” 

Most aspiring mISV ’s in particular don’t appreciate this or even acknowledge it.  One only has to look at the pricing models of most software downloadable from the Internet to get an inkling.  Most of it is under the dreaded ceiling of $29.  Most of it is aimed squarely at the home consumer, coined by some as “Clickware For the Masses”.

I’m not saying one should never price in this range, nor am I saying one should not write for B2C (Business to Consumer).  But there is a fundamental reason why B2B (Business to Business) software development companies have higher profitability rates in general.

That profitability gives them stability and long term staying power that is not evidenced by most so called companies hammering out product and selling it below thirty bucks.

Now, at this juncture it’s only fair to state that much of the under thirty dollar crowd are neither programmers not business minded people.  As always with generalizations there are going to be exceptions, maybe you the reader are one of them.  But across the board we see more abandonware in this price range than anywhere else.

The reasons are varied and complex in many respects and there are more than a few.  But it would be fair to say the most consistent reasons are under capitalization, no plan beyond turning $30 (I’m rounding out here – common price is $29.99 or – gulp – $19.99) a pop into the next Google and the sad fact that most programmers working in this price range as mISV ’s are not competent as programmers or business people.

A serious, often fatal deficit, arguably more devastating than under capitalization.  Not that they couldn’t improve their skills, but most don’t and they don’t while arguing vehemently why they should not which, all things said and done, is incredibly lame.

Consider for example that User Interface design is an integral part of software development and most importantly of our marketing and repeat sales in many instances.

Most User Interfaces in this price range look like limping rejects from Windows 95.  Rejects that were not even satisfactory under the Windows 95 environment frankly.

I’ve blogged here before that their choice of icons, or lack of choice, care over UI design issues, balance, contrast, colour, usability is virtually lacking in most instances.  Near enough is not good enough.  UI design is subjective to be sure – but the finer points of that argument are not under consideration in this article.  Rather I’m referring to the absence of any consideration or even an attempt to get it right.

But the developers I’m speaking of tend to disagree.  I have concluded they disagree because they are not selling a business to the world, but instead a forlorn hope that somehow they’ll luck it out with what under any other circumstances would be a product that violated basic merchantability and fitness let alone any rational attempt at aesthetics.

When software looks the way most of this crap looks the FOS crowd can crow and pronounce their FUD based dogma that “Software should be free”.  I’m not even going to discuss here those folks suffering from the mental aberration that causes them to conclude and pronounce that “Software wants to be free” as there is no evidence for an electronic Gaia in any universe I’m aware of.

But then most FOS software – with exceptions like nix itself which frequently sports nice UI’s – looks even worse than the worst bottom feeding mISV ’s effort.

Software should not, by definition be free, though I have no problem with a person being, what I consider, short sighted enough to give away hours of work if they want to do so – but I reject with total contempt any politically motivated nonentity trying to make it compulsory – unless they’ve recently invented a social system where nobody works, everybody is well off and they themselves can demonstrate that they are managing to eat without having a day job, stealing or sponging off social welfare. 

It’s not just UI either – it’s code, it’s scope, it’s market research it’s…

Well it’s all the things they tend to whine they can’t afford to do.

What we’ve done in this industry is manage to take an incredibly complex and disciplined process that takes massive amounts of time, effort, study and to some extent money (the best tools for productive development are rarely “free”) and tell everybody that “anybody can do it” leading to a stream of undisciplined underachievers looking for a fast buck.

We’ve told the consumer in no uncertain terms that our labor is worth very little by promoting product at a price that does not deliver economic sustainability.

It’s hard to find another industry or profession that has shot itself in the foot with so many projectiles.

We eulogize, fantasize and tremble over software piracy, hurling obscene amounts of money at products that all to often fail utterly to deliver the benefit they purport to supply.   Yet we overlook if not dismiss in contempt the obvious suggestion that maybe we are not covering our shrinkage.

In bricks and mortar retail sales to consumers, in particular, prices charged factor in loss of product through damage and theft.  How many mISV”s bother to factor in expenses let alone shrinkage?

Consider that the “marketing strategy” of most mISV ’s is deep discounting.  Their entire USP (Unique Selling Point) is “I’m cheaper than XYZ established brand” even though in reality the product is rudimentary by comparison, if not technically inept and shallow.  Even the ones who clone to the letter rarely offer any perceivable benefit – and rarely succeed as businesses – the obvious exceptions aside.

So What Price Is The Right Price?

Easy to answer actually.  The one that delivers a sustainable business.  Anything less than that is a total unadulterated waste of time and resources.  It’s not the one that Joe Blow the consumer told you he’s prepared to pay necessarily either.  People suggest pricing (high and low) based on many factors and you can bet those factors have nothing to do with commercial sustainability.

That’s not to say you don’t listen – clearly a product must be priced according to what the market can pay.  But you must listen and be prepared for something that you might not like to hear or conclude and that is:

Maybe your product isn’t commercially viable at all?!

That’s pretty alarming I agree.  But it doesn’t make it any less important, if anything it makes it pertinent and overriding.  If it’s not possible to sell a product – any product – for the purposes of deriving sustainable, achievable income then there is no point whatsoever in ever writing a line of code for it unless your intended goal is to:

a) Make a loss and go out of business.

b) You’re happy to stick your head Ostrich like into a hole.

c) You are a masochist and enjoy the process of financial failure.

d) You’re a Richard Stallman convert and your intention is not to sell in the first place.

Where do your interests lay?

FOS Is Shafting Society – Not Merely ISV’s

Yep.  Sad to say the implications of FOS go wider than socio political belief systems that somehow conclude, a point I’ve never been able to identify with, that commercial = Evil.

What the FOS crowd have managed to do is convince big business that using FOS is a really great idea.  That has an impact on every economy.  National economies, regional economies, employment economies and the often overlooked economies of scale whereby FREE tends to have the reverse effect of that which is intended and creates monopolies rather than eliminates them.

The whole model for paying for support not software has not materialized.  All these companies embracing FOS have embraced FREE – nothing else.  What this means is yet another series of twelve gauge, double rounds at automatic fire rates into our own collective foot.

The companies are abusing the concept, sure.  The only message they got, predictably, was FREE.  Nothing else.  There’s no ethics under consideration here, no goodwill to men and no concept of free as in “beer” or free as in “air”.

Merely FREE.

You can’t blame them.  Greed manifests in many forms and it’s only logical and predictable that this would occur.  That the premise of FOS would be overlooked and exploited.

Yet with each new corporate FOS conquest the FOS crowd cheer like deluded inmates of a byte ensconced psychiatric ward.

It’s not sad – it’s absolutely pathetic.  Given that many contributors to FOS – who contribute I believe for all the right and decent reasons in general – are corporate, cubicle style developers what they are doing is programming their own obsolescence.

But few see it or even consider it.  I guess it’s more fun to be an economic anarchist on Slashdot than it is to consider the ramifications of playing with economic anarchy as a hobby.

Don’t agree?  How much FOS have you donated to?  And if you do – how much FOS is used by others you know and how much have they donated?

How this ties to commercial software pricing is literally this.  We’ve always had free software, we’ve always had the bottom feeders too and their economic Sub-Antarctic pricing models, but now we’ve educated more people (big business in particular) that they can get it for nothing, that they should get it for nothing, that they have a God given right to get it for nothing.

This impacts even on the closed source free software, let alone the bottom feeders themselves in this industry.  They too become maligned for not releasing source and not releasing the whole shebang for free.

They too are criticized broadly and harshly for being bloated capitalistic fat cats when in reality they are struggling to make ends meet and put bread in their children’s mouths.

It’s not just software either – it’s music too.  Independently releasing musicians are tarred with the same brush by many as that of the mega record companies.  When in reality all they are doing is performing fee for service.  We’re telling people that right brained people and their creative output are worth less than those, the majority who couldn’t even begin to understand, implement and indeed invest the requirements for that output.

What’s right with that?

I’ve firmly come to the conclusion we have to draw a line in the sand as mISV ’s and ISV’s.  Advertising supported software is gutted every rotation of the economic clock, so there’s no long term model there.  The first victim of a recession is advertising.  The second victim is the deep discounter.  Marry this with a rabid belief that a type of human output should be free to suit a misguided theory based in economic misogyny and we have a recipe for a lot of pain for our sector.

To draw that line, particularly in the increasingly rare instances where you are the first or among the first players in a market, we need to price with profitability, with commercial viability in mind.

Prices can always be adjusted down as needed, but it’s a hell of a lot harder to price up.  Particularly in this sector – though it doesn’t seem to be to difficult for the oil industry to achieve…

Which brings me to the final point of consideration.  Our pricing structure has not kept pace with the cost of living.  We’re still trying, in way to many instances, to sell at a price scale that we were using pre dot com bust if not pre Internet era.

We need to factor this.  Few mISV ’s are in a market segment, especially the sharply peaking verticals, that allow them to enjoy the kind of turnover mass markets – and by consequence higher profits – enjoy.  Very few indeed.  Costs are incremental.  More downloads, more credit card processing and other costs manifest as higher fees when we aim for high turnover of product.  Scatter gun sales are not going to work in these markets – can not work – and we need to have the intestinal fortitude to understand it and price accordingly.

Fewer sales more profit is not the oxymoron business newbie’s think it is.

If it scares you then maybe it’s time to address your fears and quit hiding from your own reflection?

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
He was a genius – that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities. – Robertson Davies

(Hint – Robertson Davies wasn’t talking about people advocating FOS).

Dan Hite, a startup, and his SpellQuizzer are one such example, and the focus of what I’m writing about today.

I’ve known Dan for many years now.  In fact he was the developer of a another product that was very successful and that he successfully sold to another company late last year.

An mISV ’s dream. 

Dan’s new product – SpellQuizzer – was born because Dan “…[had]originally developed [it] for my daughters to help them learn their weekly spelling lists from school. Before I made SpellQuizzer the scene each night after dinner was my wife or I (usually my wife) would have each daughter sit at the kitchen table with pencil and paper while we recited their spelling words to them.  They would write them down and then we would correct them making them print out the ones they got wrong.  It was always a pain getting them to sit still for it and they always gave us a hard time about having to correct their errors. The nightly struggle was getting tiring and it occurred to me that there had to be a way to automate the task and remove the nightly ordeal.“

Hmm.  Those of us with children of our own will be able to relate to this I’m sure, plenty of pain there and solving pain is what independent software developers do…

What Dan did was develop a program that would let him type in their weekly spelling words and make a sound recording of each one.  Now if you are either familiar with how teachers are trained to teach, or have been trained as a teacher as I have, then you will instantly know that this makes excellent sense.

Visual and audio clues are essential in the process of learning to spell for children.  Just seeing the words is not enough. Hearing words helps them to obtain cues, not only for pronunciation, but also in learning key parts of the word, to aid in problem solving and remembering how to spell it.

This is a pretty elegant solution to my mind.  It’s simple in implementation, as it needs to be, lacks clutter and unnecessary  bells and whistles and is a tool that will serve children learning spelling admirably.

SpellQuizzer aids the parent and the teacher too in respect of being able to re-quiz students on any words that need correction.

This is a vital step and one of the most difficult, especially for parents, as children hate being corrected.  Dan’s experience has been that they don’t mind when SpellQuizzer  corrects them however.  Ironic, but that’s the nature of child psychology as parents and teachers are painfully aware. 

So in effect SpellQuizzer addresses two major pain points.  Drilling children in spelling and reinforcing what they are learning.  Dan reports that his own research and experience has shown that the kids love it.

This is a vital key.  We’ve all seen computer software for education that misses the mark.  While kids love games it doesn’t have to be a game in the strictest sense of the word to be fun.  Fun comes with interaction and a sense of achievement too, and this is what SpellQuizzer is all about.

I was pleased to hear Dan say:

“Like adults they appreciate something that makes a job easier.  And I also learned that kids are often more willing to take correction from a computer than from a parent (sad but true).  Maybe that’s because when mom or dad says they got something wrong deep down they are irritated to have gotten it wrong in front of their parent.”

Indeed.   There are a multitude of factors at play here ranging from embarrassment, as Dan points out, to frustration and even boredom.  Kids are perceptive too.  You may think you’re sounding calm and reasonable over the matter – but they know better…

What’s important about this, from both the perspective of the ISV and the customer, to my mind is this:

“The girl’s weekly spelling test grades immediately went from B’s and C’s to A’s.  At least half the time they were getting perfect scores.  I’d just have them use the program once per night (usually taking up less than 10 minutes of their time) and by the end of the week they were ready for their Friday test.“

What Dan has done is create a product that genuinely addresses an issue he himself faces, at least did face, as clearly the software is delivering tangible results.

This is a huge advantage for Dan and we can all take a leaf out of his book.  Unless a product solves a pain point, in this case getting kids to learn, correct and enjoy spelling, then a product has no basis in reality.

It’s what makes a superior product rather than just a feeble attempt at trying to become the next FaceBook or YouTube whatever.

Kudos to Dan for his approach and implementation.

The implementation is simple.  It needs to be simple and it’s clear Dan understood this when designing SpellQuizzer.  It’s neat, well laid out and large.  Large buttons, large print, perfect for kids not used to reading 8 and 11 point type.

The lists of spelling words are configurable by parents or teachers, which means it’s a no brainer to match any curriculum in the English speaking world at any rate (USA, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand and other places).

In fact you can even create large spelling lists and have SpellQuizzer randomize the words – perfect for drilling as many kids tend to memorize things by order as opposed to actually being able to spell the word.  Not to mention it adds a degree of variation that assists in preventing boredom which would otherwise set in if everything was the same way every time.

This is a perfect piece of software for parents with young children.  But then again it’s equally well suited to classroom use by teachers too.

Check out Dan’s site, rather a nice design by AltaWebWorks, and take a look at some brilliantly executed training videos he has there for the software too.

Right now Dan is prepared to issue a free license to any teacher who requests it with the provisory that they do not install it on multiple computers.

Note well – this is a temporary offer and Dan is reserving the right to terminate the policy at anytime – so if you know a teacher who may be interested don’t waste anytime.  Send them across to http://www.spellquizzer.com

SpellQuizzer sells for US $29.95

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. – Sir Richard Steele