Archive for September, 2008

Do People LIKE to be Nickel-and-Dimed?

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

Here’s one I can’t work out. Why is it that every $40 motel and budget hotel seems to come with free Wi-Fi and a complimentary, if unexciting, continental breakfast, while at luxury hotels, wireless is an extra $10 a night, and a coffee and bagel is 8 bucks?

It doesn’t make sense to me. The kind of people who pay $290 a night for a hotel room clearly could afford $300 a night for a room with an Internet connection, and charging separately just seems annoying. I’d even go so far as to say it seems tacky to make the customer even have to consider whether to pay another piddly 10 bucks for something that ought to come standard. Sort of unbecoming for a classy hotel.

There’s clearly something fundamental here that I’m missing, because this difference in pricing strategies is very common. I spent quite a while mulling this over the other day, and I only came up with one somewhat bizarre explanation.

Do people like to be charged separately? Perhaps affluent business travelers and vacationers actually enjoy having extra opportunities to spend money? “Of course I want to enable wireless access for an extra $10!” “Ah, what a jet-setter I am, I just spent $20 for an omelette and a mimosa!” It just wouldn’t be as much fun if everything was included in the price of the room.

I can’t really relate to that mindset, and I’m not exactly sold on this explanation, but it’s the best one I can come up with at the moment.

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Website Marketing Tips

Friday, September 19th, 2008

It was a lot of work getting EverybodyInn out the door. It’s here now, but with a brand-new website it feels disturbingly like a tree falling in a deserted forest. If nobody knows your website exists, they certainly won’t be beating a path to your door.

So you gotta figure out how to spread the word. A lot of software companies, like mine, are uncomfortably dependent on the search engines (and in particular, on Google) for their livelihoods. Don’t get me wrong, the Internet is a revolution for small companies that can’t yet afford to attend trade shows or run advertisements in trade magazines, but it does make me uneasy being so dependent on a few companies. Search engines can bring a lot of visitors to your website, if you design your website correctly. And if you don’t… well, then we’re back to that silent forest of falling trees.

I’m somewhat new to this whole Internet marketing thing, so in the course of building the EverybodyInn site, I did a good amount of research on search engine optimization (SEO). That’s the art (definitely not a science!) of writing websites so that the search engines will rank them high for your desired keywords and search phrases.

Here are some of the best articles I’ve found on the topic:

  • Website Marketing Advice - This site is actually aimed at bed-and-breakfast owners who are having a website designed for their B&B, but even as a software developer and part-time web designer, I learned some new tricks.
  • Search Engine Optimization - Written by the founder of another startup software company (he makes help desk software), this page has lots of good practical tips and also a good discussion on figuring out what keywords you should be focusing on optimizing your pages for (they may not always be what you initially think!).
  • On-page SEO for Small Companies - Some overlap with the previous article, but a good summary, and a great discussion on avoiding Google’s penalty for duplicate content (two pages shouldn’t have the same text, but sometimes you do want to say the same thing in several different ways).
  • SEO You Should Always Do - I think I’ve done most of these, after reading this article. Another good list of actionable advice. The author of this article (Stephane) also wrote an ebook about increasing traffic to your website. I found it helpful, although perhaps he chose a bit too much breadth of coverage at the expense of depth on any particular topic. But it only cost me $15, and at that price I figured if I learn anything that gets me even one extra sale, it will have paid for itself many times over.

There are also a lot of ethically-dubious “black hat” SEO techniques that I won’t mention here or use on my site. Not only do most of them involve deceiving your visitors/customers, they can also get you banned from the search engines’ listings entirely. (This actually happened to BMW for a while!) And in any case, you don’t really need those techniques. Just write useful content using the sort of language your customers speak, take advantage of some easy and common-sense web design techniques, and avoid other web design techniques that will actively hurt your SEO efforts.

Oh yeah, and be patient. It takes time for Google and other search engines to crawl your website and adjust their rankings.

That part’s no fun.

Posted in Marketing, SEO | 2 Comments »

EverybodyInn Ships!

Monday, September 15th, 2008

Right on schedule, today I released Wholeweal Software’s first product, EverybodyInn, a Windows application to help bed-and-breakfasts, guesthouses, and small hotels keep track of their guests and reservations.

A lot of software gets written where the programmers went just far enough. They found a solution to the problem at hand, and then stopped there. And this isn’t limited to small one-off programs that people write for their own use; unfortunately, a lot of commercial software seems to be written this way as well.

One of my design goals in developing EverybodyInn was to not write that kind of software. Instead, I gave a lot of thought to each feature of the program, and tried to work out a user interface that lets you use the feature in the easiest and most intuitive way possible, without having to do extra work that doesn’t actually address your problem.

Let me give you an example. In many other reservation management software products, when you create a new reservation for a customer who is new to your hotel, you start by telling the program to create a new reservation. Then, when it asks you to select a customer from its customer list, you have to jump over into a “customer management” module in order to create your new customer’s record. Then you have to jump back to the new reservation in order to select the customer you just created. It’s a lot of extra scurrying around that just distracts you from the thing you sat down in front of the computer to do.

EverybodyInn doesn’t work that way. When you create a new reservation, you have the option of selecting from your previous guests. But if your guest is new, you simply enter their information right there on the reservation form, and EverybodyInn figures out that it’s a new guest and creates the new guest record in the background. If you select a previous guest and then change the address or phone number, EverybodyInn updates the guest information right then and there. It doesn’t break your concentration by forcing you to enter information into several different locations in the program.

It’s little things like this that add up to a more pleasant experience using a software application. To me, it’s part of the craftsmanship of building a software product that I can be proud of.

On the EverybodyInn website, there’s a screenshot tour that covers most of the main features of the program, and a free 30-day trial you can download. If you own or manage a small hotel or inn, try it out, and let me know what you think.

Now that EverybodyInn has shipped, I’ll be planning out new features and improvements for the next version of the program. So if there are features missing that you absolutely can’t live without (or would just be really helpful), let me know!

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Time for Trivialities

Saturday, September 6th, 2008

You never realize just how time-consuming all of the little details can be until you’re knee-deep in them and just have to keep slogging through!

I’ve been busy getting ready for the launch of EverybodyInn and there are just so many little details that need to be accounted for. I’ve been on teams that shipped software products before, so I wasn’t exactly unaware of all of the little things it takes, but this is the first time I’ve been completely responsible for the entire process. Creating the code that makes up a software program is only a part (a large part, of course) of building a shippable product. It’s easy to forget about all the little things that are left to do, and fool yourself into thinking you’re ready to ship well before you actually are.

EverybodyInn icon

So this week I’ve been busy working on the product website for EverybodyInn, putting together a tour of screenshots, fixing those last annoying bugs in the program that only seem to pop up now, making sure the setup programs installs everything correctly, hooking up the back-end systems and payment processor, making sure all the legal and regulatory ducks are in a row, etc.

Things are coming along nicely, and I’m hoping (cross your fingers) to release EverybodyInn on September 15th.

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