Best Attendance Development Blog

I just made a major equipment upgrade. What an improvement! My last three computers have been Dells, and I’ve been very happy with them all. My old machine would actually time out on localhost when doing web development. Quite the sad situation. Prices on desktops are a bit cheaper, but I love being mobile. There are too many distractions at home; I’m more productive when I can get out and about. But I wanted a big screen and the big power that a desktop could provide. I finally decided that the Dell Studio 17 would meet my needs.

It has a 17” high definition screen (I love the vibrant colors!!). I’m not a huge fan of the wide screen laptops, which is basically all you can get now. But the 900 vertical pixels on this machine actually provide a bigger viewing area than the screen on my previous laptop did. It’s got a 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB DDR3 RAM, a 500GB 7200RPM hard drive, a dedicated video card with 1GB onboard memory, and JBL sound. I did some shopping and got a great deal on this one for $300 less than what it was listed for on the Dell web site.

My last operating system was Windows XP. I love Windows 7! It’s so easy to use, and it just makes sense.

Today was spent transferring the software and data from my old system to my new one, so I didn’t get a lot done on my business. But here are the things on my list:

 Set up a/b testing:

- Half of visitors go to buy page as it currently exists

- Half of visitors go directly to order form

Exclude my own visits from statcounter

Create custom landing page for youth group segment

International address fields for the product

These will be on my list for next Saturday.

Running a small part time business is all about setting priorities.  I feel like as long as I’m making small, continuous progress, that’s all that counts.

If I just do something to increase the sales effectiveness of my business by 1% each day, at the end of a year, it won’t be 365% better, because the effects compound.  At the end of the year, my business would actually be 37780% (37 times) more effective.  The effect is not linear, but geometric.

I’ve made a few good improvements recently: finally decided on a theme for my blog, integrated a new order form into my web site, added a new feature (CSV import) to my product, and increased my Google Adwords campaign from 10 keywords to 90.  I spent some time deciding which hardware to upgrade to, and settled on the HP G71-340US laptop.

There are lots and lots of things that I still want to do.  I need to finish submitting my PAD file to the remaining download sites on my list.  I’d like to create a custom landing page for each sector of my market (first of all, for the youth ministry sector).  I’d like to re-skin my application so it blends better with Windows 7.

On the consulting side of the house, I’ve been doing some light marketing for my web site design services, but I’d like to take the next step of checking out some of the online freelance web sites, such as rentacoder.com.  I need to expand my portfolio so that I can stand on one leg in my local Minneapolis market.

And I need to get started on developing the web based version of my app.  I have an idea for a textbook I’d like to write, which takes a novel approach to teaching web site design.

The one thing that is in short supply, though, is time.  One mistake many small business owners make is letting the business consume their whole lives.  I’ll be frank: this business is not my top priority.  I have family, friends, a relationship, a full time job, I like staying in shape, and I like having some time to relax.  I only spend about eight hours on this business each week.  But I think that’s OK as long as I’m making continual improvements, because the improvements compound.

Finding a great ecommerce provider is tough.  When I originally launched Attendance Management System in 2004, I used RegSoft, which was a good choice at the time.  But in recent years, they’ve been relegated to an insignificant revenue stream in Digital River.  I get the feeling that RegSoft isn’t receiving much attention, because they haven’t advanced in features or usability at all in the past five years.

I decided to go hunting for a new provider.  I randomly started with iPortis and later found out that their order pages were only partially secured with SSL, giving IE users a dire warning.  Plimus seemed like a good bet, so I switched to them.  Only to find some hidden elephants over there too.

Apparently, the first five customers of your product are subjected to an annoying robot phone verification process before their orders are approved.  They don’t allow vendors to place test orders.  And they still haven’t answered my technical support questions, after I’ve contacted them twice with the same question.

So I’m moving on, this time to FastSpring, which received good reviews by other mISVs:  http://successfulsoftware.net/2009/10/12/a-survey-of-ecommerce-providers-for-software-vendors/.  The only downside to FastSpring is that they don’t offer recurring billing, which I’ll need down the line when my web app goes live.  But there’s nothing that says I can’t use a difference service for that product.  We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.