Association of Software Professionals

Help! My sales are down!
That’s a feeling that probably every software author has every now and then.  Here’s a checklist for you, compiled from the advice from other authors and some ideas from me.

Don’t panic
It’s absolutely normal that there are some random days with bad sales. Sometimes even several days in a row. That just happens. (If it hasn’t happened to you, please contact me and tell me your secret.) Furthermore there can be other normal influences like the seasons, weekends, the weather, holidays, big sports or TV events.

Check your reputation
Some sites rate your website. You can verify that at:
www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/yourwebsite.com
www.siteadvisor.com/sites/yourwebsite.com
www.google.com/sidewiki/feeds/entries/domainpath/yourwebsite.com/full

You might also want to verify your payment processor’s website. Furthermore you should register at Google Webmaster Central (www.google.com/webmasters/) to allow Google to notify you in case of problems.

Check your website
Use the currently common browsers to visit your site. Does it look okay?

Check your downloads
Try to download your programs. Do the links still work? Are all programs code-signed and is the signature still valid? Are there any virus alerts? (Upload the exe to www.virustotal.com to check.) Do the programs work with the current Windows versions?

Check your logfiles
Are there new strange referrers? There might be a new crack or serial out for your software. Where does your traffic come from (regarding websites and regarding countries), now and a month ago? What changed?

Check the trends
If you have a long-term decline, check Google Trends (www.google.com/trends) to see if your search keywords are on a long-term decline, too. If you’re still selling Palm Pilot software, it might be a good idea to change to a fresh market.

Check your competitors
Do they have a new shiny website or great new features?

Check the cracks
Use Google to find a crack or serial for your product. (Note: Be very careful with these sites. Expect viruses and attacks.) You can use CrackTracker (www.cracktracker.net) to check the one-click-hosters.

Check for problems
Combine your product name with „forum“ or „problem“ and search the web for this phrase.

Check the ASP newsgroups
The ASP newsgroups are also a great place to ask for help with your products and websites. Don’t be shy, ask for help, the newsgroups are crowded with experienced software authors.

Anything else?
Got an idea to add? Go for it, post a comment!

-

Thomas Holz is the owner of ITSTH and the author of outlook tools to synchronize, remove duplicates and use boilerplate texts , writes in his devblog and has regular panic attacks when sales are down again for a few days…

Thomas Holz Uncategorized checklist, sales

Many ASP members have been in business for quite some time and have their programs up and running. But the times (and Windows versions) are changing and there are some things one might easily overlook, being so used to one’s own programs.

Here are 6 things that you should check on your programs:

Code signing

Signed executables are important at many stages nowadays. Even though the customers usually wouldn’t notice the actual signatures, they will notice the reduced warnings that a signed executable causes. This warnings do not only come from Windows during the installation, but also from antivirus programs and other security software which rate the “trust” of each program. That’s why you should not only sign your installer, but also all ‘.exe’ and ‘.dll’ files that you’re installing.

High-resolution icons

I never noticed this one myself until a customer told me. The 16×16 and 32×32 icons in my programs looked pixilated and outdated. You can add higher resolutions to your “.ico” file with the freeware IcoFX. Be sure to keep a backup of the old “.ico” file because not all IDEs allow linking the new “.ico” files. As a workaround you can use the command-line tool ReplaceVistaIcon (available on Codeproject) which can replace the “.ico” section in your executable with the new “.ico” file.

Common controls 6

The new version of the Microsoft GUI will allow applications to have a “nicer” look, for example the slightly rounded buttons. You can activate this by adding a manifest file with a “Microsoft.Windows.Common-Controls” section. You can either specify the manifest file in your project settings or use Microsoft’s manifest.exe command-line tool.

UAC

Many customers now have Windows versions with split rights accounts. In normal mode a lot of things will fail, like installing a service or creating a shortcut in the startup folder. If your program requires full admin rights for any of its actions, you should be aware of this. If the function fails you should either give the user a **helpful** error message or handle the UAC “elevation” to full rights automatically.

You can detect the type of account your program is running under with GetTokenInformation and TokenElevationType. It is not possible to elevate a running process. You have to start a new process with ShellExecuteEx, specifying “runas” as verb.

Progress bar

If your program includes any sections that display a progress bar for some time, then you should support the Windows 7 feature of displaying the progress also in the Windows task bar. The details greatly depend on your programming language. Use IID_ITaskbarList3 as a starting point.

Larger fonts

The screen resolutions have become so ridiculously high, that it’s difficult to read the text on the screen. That’s why many customers have activated larger fonts in Windows. This causes Windows to automatically scale up all dialogs. This works nicely with most standard dialogs but can cause problems with custom controls. Check your application while large fonts are activated.

Thomas Holz is the owner of ITSTH and the author of outlook tools to synchronize, remove duplicates and use boilerplate texts and writes in his devblog, if he still has too much time after optimizing the website.

Thomas Holz Articles product marketing, software, software marketing

Introduction

There are a few interesting tools around to analyze the speed of your website. Yahoo’s YSlow and Google’s Page Speed (both Firefox plugins) are a good start and offer a lot of advice and background information. In this post you’ll see graphs from Webpagetest.

This website offers the best visual analysis IMHO and shows exactly how the page is loaded, which file was received in which connection and at which time. I’ve used it to optimize my file sync webpage and will use the steps that I made as example. Here’s my starting point:

Image 1: First benchmark

Each bar represents a file. Time goes from left to right (less is better) and the different colors represent the different aspects of the file transfer. Read more…

Thomas Holz Articles loading time, page speed, website optimization