Out With the Old, In With the New!
You would think that as summer is just starting things would be slowing down as they usually do around the summer months for us, but this June and July have probably been the busiest months for me in years! Above working very hard on the networked version of LandlordMax, we just released a major website upgrade of LandlordMax a few weeks ago. This was the culmination of many months of hard work, and I’m happy to say it’s a huge success.
Of course as with all new releases, there’s always a lot of follow-up work involved. Some features we wanted to release as part of the website had been postponed so that we could release earlier. Now please do pay careful attention here, the website wasn’t released before it was ready, it wasn’t all buggy and nothing worked (we did have some minor bugs like all new major releases), but rather we omitted some nice to have features which we released shortly thereafter and are still continuing to release today. We’ve almost had a silent website every day since we initially released. That’s the benefit of automating your releases!
Right now our biggest push is to improve the videos. Although very accurate in their information, some are a bit dated. Not only that but the sizes of the videos aren’t as consistent as we’d like (some are smaller and others larger). So we’re working very hard right now to clean all that up. That and we’re going to add many new videos over the next few weeks and months.
Another major enhancement is that the videos will no longer be popups. We’ve been discovering that too many people either turn off popups or quick disable popups when asked by any website. Once this action is done, or the feature is disabled, the videos no longer work for these people. And unfortunately enough people don’t fully appreciate what the issue is and therefore we’ve decided to adjust the website so that it works for everyone. These changes are coming very soon!
There’s a few other enhancements we’re working on, but overall we’re very happy with the new website. And best of all, we’re already seeing very positive and measurable results! It’s the best I could’ve asked for. And I’d also like to take a second to show my appreciation to Reuben for all the extra efforts he did in helping us realize the website. Thank you Reuben for all your hard work!!
· July 18th, 2011 · 6:18 am · Permalink
BTW did you or will you do any split testing to optimize for conversions (i.e. Google Website Optimizer?)
· July 22nd, 2011 · 1:19 pm · Permalink
At this point we’ve basically just released with what we think is the best version, so there hasn’t been any split testing. All I have to compare with is before we launched, and there does appear to be a very significant improvement.
We do plan on doing split testing but just not right away. There are too many bigger improvements that we’d like to do beforehand. For example, I believe we really need to re-do most of the videos as some are outdated or just not as good as they could be. For example, “Find out who;s late paying your rents in seconds” section of the software has been improved a lot since the video was initially made, which means that many of the new and handy enhancements aren’t shown in the video. It’s still similar, but now it’s even better. So we’d like to show that.
I have a list of about 20 similar items I think we need to get done before we’re ready to do any type of split testing. Things that I believe will give us a much bigger benefit.
That and we’re planning to release a networked version pretty soon, so that will also necessitate some pretty significant changes to the website. Instead of just a single product with one price point, we’ll now have 1 product with multiple versions (Desktop only, and so on). Which means that any testing we do now will probably be lost or of lesser effect in that effort.
Split testing is great, and I strongly believe in it, and it is definitely planned, it’s just that we’re not ready for it yet. We have some bigger items to hit first.
· July 22nd, 2011 · 1:34 pm · Permalink
Makes sense… Exciting stuff!