Pay No Attention To That Man Behind The Curtain

Spring is a time of flowers, rain, tornadoes, and spring cleaning.  For me, the last item is quite often forgotten, but overall I do try to get a little more organized around this time of year.

One thing about organization-once you have a system in place, it’s hard to break away to start a new habit.  I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve set up a new database for managing my todo items (all in HanDBase of course!), but after a few months I find myself returning to my tried and true methods.

Many users will say our use of Yahoo groups as our forums is an example of our old habits.  We have actually had a Yahoo group before they were called Yahoo groups- they were called eGroups.  And that company was bought out many years ago and merged into Yahoo’s offering.  At the time we set it up because they were all the rage, and offered things that a forum based site couldn’t.  They also didn’t tax the site you were running, which was a major concern as our site was almost always running slow at the time.

Fast forward 9 or so years, and we’re probably one of the few Yahoo groups that are still active, with over 6000 members, and a good number joining and leaving every day.  But many customers have asked us why it’s so difficult for them to join the Yahoo group, and why we don’t just get a forum on our site.

Well that time has finally come- we have set up a new forum based on PHPBB3 for providing customer support and discussion of topics:

http://www.ddhsoftware.com/forum

I hope that the many users on our Yahoo group follow us over to this as we phase out the use of a Yahoo group.  It’s served us well in the past, but time to take advantage of the advantages a forum system provides, like camping on to subjects of interest, dividing posts into sub-forums based on platform, etc.

That last part is the one that gives me a teary eye.  In almost every other area of the internet, you won’t find a group of people using different devices and platforms all engaging on a similar topic without the ‘religious’ flame wars and such over which is better.  HanDBase has been common ground for Mac and Windows users, and common ground for Palm OS, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, iPhone and more.  And I can’t recall one conversation that became a ‘mine is better than yours’ type of conversation.  The fact that we’ve made it so long without one is a testament to our customer base- these are intelligent people proving that there is still hope for the human race on the interwebs!

I hope you all enjoy using the new forums, and don’t hesitate to let me know if there are any issues or suggestions.

No matter how much I try to stop time or even slow time down, I have not been successful in creating more hours in the day.  But when you’re a small business in a trying economic climate with increased competition, you find yourself stretching yourself more and more just to keep up the pace.

DDH Software is not a lot like other companies, and that’s probably my fault.  Because I was an engineering major and not a business major, my confidence lies in what I can tackle from a technical nature, and not from a business perspective.  For that reason, I’ve always played it safe relative to finances and thus we’ve never taken on any investors, or even run any debt.

And thus whenever times got tough, like when our mainstay platform (Palm OS) started to die a slow death, we have had to react conservatively.  And we’ve had to thus stay lean, personnel-wise.  This means having very few employees, and spending our time and money wisely to get the most out of it.

A few years back we did away with phone based technical support – it was just too expensive to to on a product with such low cost and volumes.  I really didn’t want to axe it- we knew how some people valued phone support as great customer service, and it was a unique feature we offered in this day and age, and were proud of.  But when you only have a few employees and most of them are on the phone all day long, we found we were very stagnant in terms of development and moving the product forward.

So we switched to relying more on email support and also using an online chat based support tool.  The online chat meant one person could help 5 people at the same time, and it definitely reduced the resource requirement we had.

But now because of today’s economic climate, we’re even leaner than ever.  Our already small staff is further reduced and now basically even having one person doing chat support cripples us as a software development company.  For this reason, we decided to try to do away with chat support for the time being.  We hope that by having the additional time for development we can better keep up with the many platforms we support, and provide more compelling solutions.  And it helps us be more financially conservative in a time where we all really need to be.

Of course, email support options are still available, and we’re still staying on top of them and getting responses out in a timely manner.  And we still have our Yahoo group which stays active with both us and lots of helpful fellow customers.  So I feel that we’re still leaving customers in good hands, support wise.  But I do want to share my apologies for having to cut out this feature of support we’ve offered- to some users I know it’s a very important feature.   Here’s hoping that we can still provide excellent customer service via email and forums, and additionally improve our effectiveness at provide compelling software and updates to you!

Follow us along on a journey, a journey of web page development.

When DDH first started in 1997, I was designing the web site using animated gifs galore and Netscape’s Composer to design the web site.  I remember when the HanDBase gallery was a single page of listings and submission involved emailing me the files directly so I could edit the ever growing listing manually.  My how things have changed!

Through the years we get asked a lot of questions about the products we sell.  And each time we get asked a question a bunch of times, we often would add it to the site, either directly to a product page, or placed with the knowledgebase.  The desire to have everything available ’self-service’ to customers is both benevolent and selfish by nature;  benevolent, because we want users to be able to enjoy using the product and not having to contact us with questions we have already been asked, and selfish because- well, the same reason applies!

In the quest for completeness, we have developed web pages that are pretty long- not a page on our site can be visited without making judicious use of the scroll bar even on a 1920×1200 monitor.  And in that sense, we’ve created a monster.

A new user who visits the site could potentially find the answers to all of their questions, but because of TMI, too much information, they see a large page with way too much text, and skip it entirely.  The end result is that they either move on completely or still wind up having to contact us to find their questions answered.  This TMI thus works backwards to its intended goal.

So now we’ve been going back and redoing a few pages at a time, using less text, providing less answers per page, and hopefully raising the chances someone will actually read the text on there.  Hopefully we don’t ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ and lose the valuable answers, which we’re moving into their own FAQ or Knowledgebase (KB) articles.   So far, the iPhone main page, the Mac Desktop, and the Mac iPhone related pages were updated- take a look:

iPhone HanDBase Page

HanDBase Plus for iPhone Mac OS

HanDBase for Mac

and we hope to use more of the same on other pages as we update them.  That is, less text, more readability and making use of embedded video tours and such to show the way.

Please let us know how we’re doing in that regard- we want to create a site that is readable, friendly but still informative!