People constantly whine and complain that all the good domain names are taken; that if only www.myproduct.com were still available, their future success would be secured. This is a load of codswallop. Sure, the boring single word names are all taken, but show a little creativity here! If we’ve learned anything from companies with strange names like Google, Squidoo, and del.icio.us, it’s that you don’t have to be a creative genius to be original, and that people are more than willing to accept the quirky and unusual if it leads to something worthwhile.

The same holds true for free email accounts. darren@yahoo.com does not belong to me, but does that mean I should settle for darren_d_1972@yahoo.com? Not exactly eye catching, is it? So how do you come up with an unusual, but slightly captivating name?

To quote Lionel Trilling, “Immature artists imitate, mature artists steal.”

I’ve always prided myself on my maturity. For every new email account, I dip into a hidden font of wordy weirdness in the form of a much used and battered copy of Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil.

Pick a poem at random and start reading. I guarantee that before you reach the end of the first verse you will have found half a dozen phrases that would make anyone stop and stare.Today’s random poem is The Wretched Monk, and in case you’re wondering, www.thewretchedmonk.com is still available. It’s a short poem of fourteen lines, and produces the following fresh, vibrant, and slightly quirky email addresses:

under_steadfast_walls@yahoo.com
of_holy_verity@hotmail.com
those_cold_halls@yahoo.com
their_austerity@hotmail.com
thrive_and_grow@yahoo.com
in_obscurity@hotmail.com
graveyard_studio@yahoo.com
ennobled_death@hotmail.com
And that’s just the first eight lines.Now, you may think these addresses are just a little too unusual; that it would be safer all round if you went for johnsmith2006a2@hotmail.com. But ask yourself this: say you receive emails from two strangers, one from johnsmith2006a2@hotmail.com, the other from (final verse of The Ransom) corn_and_grapes@hotmail.com. Which would you read first?If you want to be noticed, you need to be noticeable. You need to stand out in the crowd, because the crowd is getting bigger and bigger. So toss all those boring name and number combinations out the window and start getting creative.

Programmers like to program - it’s what we do. Just like doctors like to doctor, preachers like to preach, and waiters like to wait. We like it so much, we don’t want to do anything else. We don’t want to worry about all that pesky advertising; we don’t want to spend hours or days choosing just the right words for our web-site; we don’t want to bother with all that marketing stuff - after all, the product is good enough to sell itself. Right?

Wrong.

This is the fatal flaw that destroys many small software companies. Starting out, our knowledge base is limited. We know how to write code and design software, so this is what we do. We release a version 1 of our first product, listen to feedback, and follow it up with a version 2 a couple of months later. It’s good enough to sell, but we don’t know how to sell. It has the potential to sell well if we could just get our message across, but we don’t know how to market.

The next version of PageFour is on the drawing board. After taking feedback from existing users - and scratching my head over a bottle of Merlot - a list of changes and enhancements has been carefully put together. It’s a strong list, and the product will be stronger as a result. The temptation to take this list and start writing code has been overwhelming. Six hard weeks of work, followed by a testing run, and version 3 would have been ready by the end of March.

The road to failure is filled with writing code.

For a small software company to succeed, the two parts of the business must be given equal weighting. Yes, design a great product, and keep making it greater. But we need to work just as long and hard at marketing the product, at getting our message out there.

For most of our careers, we looked down on the guys in marketing and sales, as if their jobs were somehow beneath us. Now, our success depends on learning their skills.

My development plan for PageFour has shifted somewhat. The list remains, but the time frame has changed. Instead of working for two solid months, testing heavily and releasing, I plan to release after each feature is implemented. This means four releases over the next four months - a steady development of the product, progressing side by side with the marketing.

No more mad rush to write code.

My TV remote has twenty nine buttons I’ve never used; the VCR has thirty; the DVD player twenty six. And before you ask - yes I really did count them all.

There’s a name for this kind of excess: it’s called featuritis, and it pops up in all sorts of design failures. I stumbled across an interesting article on The Featuritis Curve the other day that goes a long way to explaining why we have to endure this.

Good designs are obvious. When aesthetic and functional beauty combine, the result is not just pleasing to the eye, but a pleasure to use. This is why the iPod is so popular. Chances are it’s not the best value for money - there are probably other music players that produce a better sound, have a longer battery life, or have a whole raft of additional features - but the iPod looks like a work of art and is simple and straight forward to use.

When have you ever heard someone boast that they couldn’t program their iPod?

So who should we be designing for anyway? The 98% who use a small number of features all the time, or the 2% who use advanced features once a week? Wouldn’t it be a whole lot simpler if my TV remote had a single advanced button that opened a menu for all those quirky, unused features?

Make no mistake here - you’ve never used those mysterious buttons either, and you probably don’t know anyone who has.

Software is often designed in the same way, for the same 2% of users. Feature after feature is added, each just as prominent as the one before, with little thought given to the complexity this adds to the product as a whole.

At the nine to five over the past few weeks, we’ve been putting the finishing touches to a new product aimed at the business market. It’s the sum of eighteen months work for four programmers - plenty of time and resources to produce a first class piece of work. But it’s not first class. Dialog after dialog contains features, options, and checkboxes that no one really understands. The poor unfortunate writing the help file has to suffer every time he asks for an explanation of feature X. In some cases, even the person who designed the feature can’t explain it without re-reading his own code, and even then the explanation can be patchy.

This isn’t funny, it’s critical. Complexity like this is nothing to be proud of. But why does it happen?

You can chant ‘keep it simple‘ until you’re blue in the face, and everyone around you will nod their head in agreement. The problem is, we all have a different perception of what simple means. Programmers are geeks; they belong to the 2% who use all those weird buttons on the TV remote, and for many of them these features are absolutely essential. The sales and marketing types want to be able to say that their product is better than the competition because it can also be used to fry an egg, or do your kid’s homework. But that does not make it better.

Features are not important, it’s the product as a whole that matters. Does it do what it was designed to do, and does it do it fantastically well? Does it look good, run smoothly, and behave intuitively? If it doesn’t, then all the features in the world will not save you.

More features does not equal more sales. More features does not make for happier customers. More features will not make your product better than the competition.

PageFour has reached the stage where featuritis first raises its head. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been putting together a future development plan, and my focus throughout has been on identifying those mysterious buttons that so few of us ever use. Only time will tell if I’ve succeeded.

It’s tradition to hate the big guy. When IBM fell from grace to become just another consulting company, no one shed a tear. When Ryanair’s profits exceeded those of British Airways, many of us of Irish extraction felt a smug kind of satisfaction.

For years now, Microsoft has been the big bad - loathed by developers for all sorts of non-reasons, and vilified in the press for the shocking business tactic of trying to crush the competition. These silicon rail barons are often portrayed as demonic megalomaniacs bent on taking over the world.

We’ve yet to hear of human sacrifices, or pacts with the devil where Bill and Melinda offer up their first born in return for world domination, but they do make an appearance in the Top 10 Wackiest Conspiracy Theories.

It’s a David and Goliath thing - everyone cheers for the little guy in the loincloth. We want to see the giant take a tumble.

Not long ago, David was Google. He was young, fresh, and eager to please; he could do no wrong and the people loved him. Over the years, David followed the script and turned into Goliath. But this time there was a difference - he kept the pretty face and loincloth; he didn’t look like Goliath and we didn’t want to hate him.

Google’s homepage has been pretty much unchanged for years. At first glance you would be forgiven for thinking they were still the same old company we know and love. But take a closer look just above the search box, turn your eyes to the right, and click on more>>.

This is Goliath.

Over the past few years Google have bought up chunks of internet real estate, and their team of hot shot developers have been encroaching on territory as diverse as imaging software and mapping solutions. Google Adwords could very well be the beginning of the end for mainstream advertising, while Adsense is turning us all into mini-entrepreneurs.

With Google taking over the world, has the time come to turn on them and cheer their every failure or setback? Are we supposed to hate them with a vengeance?

Maybe so, but do we want to? Every new feature or service released by Google is free. No matter how much we want to hate the big guy, no matter how much we want to see him fall, are any of us prepared to spend money to see it happen?

I’ve just signed myself up to try out Google Analytics, a free web site analysis tool - this in the same week I was considering spending $75 on a piece of desktop software to do the same thing. I’d rather keep my $75.

Google may be Goliath, but he’s still a pretty boy with a cheeky grin - more Robin Hood than King John.

When I first created the web-site for PageFour, I’d vaguely heard of the term Search Engine Optimization. It was one of those things I assumed I’d get around to eventually, but it would just have to wait until the more important stuff like rolling out the first, and then the second release of PageFour had been dealt with.

I was wrong.

Had I read those few chapters months ago, I would have realised the importance of the URL, and chosen a domain name with more relevance to the product. www.imbt.co.uk has no meaning to anyone but me. I know it’s short for It must be Tuesday; I know IMBT Software is the company name; but does anyone else? And would it make a difference if they did? It’s the product that matters, not the company.

PageFour is software for writers, and the new URL is www.softwareforwriting.com.

It’s been live now for about a week and has already been picked up by MSN’s very industrious robots. The Google team however, seem to be sleeping on the job, and let’s not even talk about Yahoo. Still, it was something that needed to be done, and it really couldn’t have been put off any longer. All the links that I control on other websites have been changed, and the new download sites PageFour has been submitted to each carry the new URL.

Things are finally moving in the right direction.

Last Saturday I walked out the door to find that the arse end of my car was closer to the ground than it should have been. Turns out I had two flat tyres.

I was fully prepared to accept that two punctures could easily happen, even though they were on opposite sides of the car (call me naive); or that a couple of kids may have been having a laugh and decided to see what would happen if they let the air out. But the slash marks?

Was it you who slashed my tyres? You can tell me, I’ll keep it to myself.

Something like this shakes your faith in humanity. I used to believe that most people were inherently good; that given the chance most of us do the right thing most of the time. Now I’m not so sure.

Why would someone do something like this?

What are the chances that a complete stranger walking by on the street would make a detour into a private car park, pick the car parked in the farthest corner, and slash two tyres? Pretty close to zero I would imagine. So where does that leave me? There are fifteen flats in my block. Does one of them house a vandal with a stanley knife? Should I be staring accusingly at all my neighbours as I walk past? Maybe it’s the old lady with the Zimmer frame who lives in the flat below?

Who have I offended?

Fair enough, the car doesn’t get out much, but it’s always neatly parked. Perhaps the person responsible is part of a militant Free the Cars group, whose aim is to see all cars set free to roam the highways and byways of England unshackled. My limited driving habits may have been seen as ‘keeping a car in cruel and unusual circumstances.‘

Or maybe the perpetrator was part of a shady special operations team for one of the big oil companies. My ability to get by with one tank of petrol every two months may have been seen as the start of a worrying trend that had to be ruthlessly stamped on before it took hold in the general population.

Was it because it was a Ford Fiesta? Did my car lower the tone of the area? Were house prices dipping because my other car really wasn’t a porsche?

So where do I live, you may ask, that things like this would happen for no apparent reason?

The Tory heartland of the south east - East Molesey, Surrey.

I moved here because it was convenient for work, and the flat was nicely decorated. Something bothered me about the area from day one though, and it only took me a few days to work out what that something was. Walk down any street, day or night, and every face you see will be white.

East Molesey is upper middle class suburbia. Every house has two or more cars - chances are one of them is a porsche and the other an SUV. It goes without saying that the SUV has never been off road, and the green wellies in the back were not bought at Woolworths. Families consist of Mom, Dad, and two kids. Even the dog votes Conservative.

The reprobate responsible for assaulting my tyres probably used a stanley knife bought from John Lewis. There is no PoundStretcher in East Molesey, and even if there were, they wouldn’t sell stanley knives with genuine leather grips.

I’ve lived all over London: Wood Green, Fulham, Wimbledon, Harlesden, Palmers Green, Hounslow, Feltham, South Kensignton, and Bloomsbury. I’ve lived in different towns across Great Britain: High Wycombe, Bedford, Boston, Southampton. But I’ve never lived anywhere like East Molesey.

There’s plenty of money around here; lots of well packaged kids and families - all wearing the right clothes, driving the right cars, and going to the right schools.

But I don’t like it anymore.

With the release of version 1.29 of PageFour, complete with one change to a single line of code, the crackers have returned.

My personal opinion of the people downloading my software from these illegal sites is that they’re one candle shy of a decent birthday cake. If I were giving the product away for free, they probably wouldn’t touch it. After all, freeware is just so common! As soon as they realise they can steal something other people pay for, and do so from a shady web-site with Mandarin text, PageFour suddenly becomes hot property.

I can just picture the emails flying to one dank bedroom after another. “Check this out. You can use it for that novel you always wanted to write about life in a twelfth century Cistercian monastery!”

Get a life guys!

Still, some of these sites have a halfway decent pagerank, so the links do perform one useful service.

Over the holiday period I had a series of meetings with my Marketing and Security specialists to discuss the way forward for PageFour. My failure to take Seth Godin’s crown as marketing man of the year, coupled with the illicit activities of a group of bored hackers with too much time of their hands, had led me to seek out professional help.

I turned to my very own dynamic duo.

Finola - a woman of thirty some years, with a pleasing disposition and a healthy appreciation for well cooked turkey - is an expert at explaining marketing to those of us all too comfortable with concepts such as: ‘the product will sell itself.‘ She has also been known to explain colour to the blind.

Playing Batman to her Robyn was Gerry, a hotshot detective from the city of Waterford. Gerry holds the criminal element at bay with the power of his chiseled chin and no nonsense attitude, earning the grudging respect of the criminal underclass along the way.

Did I mention they’re my cousins? Of course, they were still paid handsomely for their time with a pat on the back and a firm handshake.

I listened and I learned.

_______________


In deciding to attack this marketing thing head on, I began by identifying who I was trying to sell PageFour to. Before you laugh or state the obvious, I know this should have been done months ago. But like many a programmer before me I practice my own unique form of logic; a logic that makes a kind of sense only to me.

Up until recently, I thought I was selling PageFour to ‘writers.‘ Thanks to Finola, the loose term ‘writers‘ has been replaced by ten individual customer categories; each one with their own needs, their own places to hang out, and most importantly - their own wallets.

Of these ten categories of PageFour user, four have the potential for spawning spin off products. I know what you’re thinking, and you’d be wrong - the spin off concept is not unique to the CSI universe, it does have a place in the world of software development as well.

Over the next few weeks I’ve decided to concentrate on four of these ten categories:

1. Novelists and aspiring writers
2. Fan fiction writers over the age of 18 (note the level of detail in this description)
3. Diary and Journal keepers
4. Notebook users in a business context

See if you can spot the two possible spin off products in the above list. Answers on a postcard please. The first three correct answers will each receive my best wishes for the year ahead.

Most PageFour users already fall into one or more of these categories - I simply had the good fortune of attracting their attention under the much looser description of ‘writers.‘

All I have to do now is come up with a plan of action for each of these groups. Now, let me just find Finola’s phone number …