I know I said the next business related thing I’d talk about was Incorporation, but, since I haven’t done it and may not, I’m going to skip it right now.

Instead I’m going to talk about my latest product release. I did a minor bug fix update to Suck It Down last week. At the same time, I’d put the finishing touches on my new streamlined website. You see a while back I read a PDF I downloaded by Seth Godin called “Fixing Micah’s Site”. Before reading this booklet my company website was a blog, a strait Nucleus website a lot like Reactuate. Even the links to product information in the side bar were permalinks to blog entries.

I don’t think I realized how bad it was until I changed it.

As I said awhile back, I decided to redesign it and went out looking for a designer. I found one that created a new logo for me but I couldn’t afford a site redesign, so I ended up doing it myself. [R.A.D. Productions.net] It turned out OK. I’m still not totally happy with it, but it serves it purpose well. More on that in a minute.

One thing about the design. I decided to make it not look like your typical Mac developer website. Instead I went with bolder colors and “heavier” use of them. I’m not sure if it works to not.

First thing I decided when I started the design was to focus on getting people to buy Suck It Down. That was the main purpose of the whole site. I think it is pretty unlikely people are going to buy the software without trying it out. But I give them the opportunity anyway. Buy and download links are right next to each other on every page.

When people come into the first page of the site they have the opportunity to download or buy our products. No searching or multiple clicks to get what they want.

I also added a lot more about why they should buy it to the Suck It Down page. In the past, I had a prose spiel and little bulleted list of features. Now I have a spiel and a list of problem solutions.

And it seems to be working. Since I announced the availability of the update – which in and of itself really shouldn’t motivate people to buy who haven’t before – I’ve had registrations equal to what I normally have in a month. So about a 4x increase in sales.

What else have I done to improve sales? I created a better disk image to deliver the product. When you download the software you get a better user experience. You have to approve the license and then you are presented with a window with instructions on how to drag install the product. I even completely removed the Read Me file from the image. First, 90% of people don’t read it, and second, those that do didn’t really get much information anyway.

I didn’t make any changes to the UI of the app to encourage purchasing yet. I’ll do more of that in the future.