We are working hard on restoring these features and will keep you updated on the progress here. Hopefully we should be able to restore these features within next couple of days (2nd week of November 2009).

It all started a few months back when we conducted our first set of in-depth analyses on the CurdBee website. Since going live last May to mark the launch of CurdBee Pro Edition, we got some excellent feedback from our users and also got featured on a number of prominent design/CSS galleries.

A few weeks passed, and as we tracked our visitors we noticed that the site’s bounce rates were pretty high (averaging 41%) and that our primary goal conversion (new visitor to free account sign up) was averaging at 4.2%. Our single page website (V1) was doing much better than this in terms of conversions and the bounce rate there was significantly lower as well.

With a revamp, sometimes it takes a couple of weeks for things to settle down and show some regular patterns. Yet, this was not the case with CurdBee V2, and we thus went back to the drawing board to think of possible solutions.

Conducting a few tests and interviewing some users during the next few weeks, where we were able to capture some interesting thoughts,

“I don’t know whether it’s only me, but I like your previous site. It was simple and clean. ”

“The site looks nice, but the header and footer are bit too dark, more white could have been nicer.”

Now that information was really valuable to us. We needed a little more proof before deciding what we would do though, and for hard data we turned to Crazy Egg, for some heatmap analysis.

After running these tests for a while in two separate instances, we were able to spot some of the main issues affecting the numbers.

1. Sign up, Upgrade and Extend are not links, yet visitors click them more often. Why? Do they look like links?
2. Visitors haven’t paid much attention to the screenshots in the highlights section. Didn’t they realize they are clickable and that they can view the full image?
3. The main call to action via the “Sign-up Now” button at the bottom of the features list hasn’t had much clicks on it either. Wasn’t it visible enough, especially since it was placed towards bottom of the page where users would have had to scroll down?

The problems were clear enough and we started looking for solutions. The result? CurdBee V3!

Is that all? Nope. We have more upgrades and updates, many of which have been requested again and again by our users.

Pay CurdBee with Amex and PayPal

To date we were only able to accept payments with Master and Visa credit cards,  and we’ve been getting a lot of requests asking the same questions over and over again – Do you accept PayPal?, Can I pay with Amex?.

So, we thought hey, why not make life easier for CurdBee users? As of today, both these options are now available. As far as I know, CurdBee is one of the few online billing apps to accept PayPal and we are hopeful to see a 14% increase in sales – at least, that’s what PayPal advertises on their website.

New Billing System with Yearly Payments

Yes, you heard it right. We have enabled a Yearly Subscription option for those who would like to pay upfront and enjoy a year’s worth of billing without needing to think about monthly payments. Also, with the yearly subscription, you will be only paying for 10 months (saving 17%), whether you go for the Pro Edition or for module upgrades. Check our pricing page for more details on this.

Processing payments on a daily basis and then seeing which ones go through, which cards fail, and then notifying users – that’s quite a lot of work and we need at least couple of hours to monitor all that on a daily basis.

“What if we make our billing date to 01^st of every month?” I asked Laskshan. We were analysing all the pros and cons and noticed that making CurdBee bill on a single day could be more beneficial in the long run, and that’s what we’ll be doing from now on.

Improved Support Section

At Vesess, we’ve always been passionate about providing our users with good support. With the launch of this new CurdBee site however, we’re taking our help desk experience to a whole new level. The main changes that our users will notice to the support section of CurdBee are the inclusion of a discussion forum and the introduction of a searchable knowledgebase.

The Discussions portion of the Support Section will allow users to create and reply to conversation threads. From problems to bugs and feature requests, this is where you want to end up if you want to connect with the CurdBee team as well as fellow users. We hope that the discussions space will grow quickly to become a place where CurdBee users can come to find quick, reliable help, and we’ll be doing everything in our power to make sure that this space remains productive for all involved.

Next, our new Articles section will function as an archive of tips, tricks and guides related to CurdBee. As a somewhat extensive Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page, this part of the Support Section will be particularly useful for new users, since we plan on documenting all of CurdBee’s basic functions here using an easy to navigate format.

New Demo Feature – Touch and feel the difference

Finally, and this is one of the updates we’re most excited about, you can now try CurdBee PRO for free, with all features enabled. While we hope this will encourage more of you to upgrade to PRO, you can try the full version and then go back to using the Standard Edition if you feel it’s sufficient for you.

So, why did we decide to add this feature? Going through our access logs in the run up to releasing this version of the site, we saw that a lot of users tended to make two accounts with us. First, they would create a test account to try it out and then create a legitimate one to use on a daily basis. We thought that allowing them to try PRO would limit the need for this, and that’s exactly what we implemented.

While screenshots and videos are nice, we want you to really experience the power of CurdBee PRO before you decide for or against it. We’re confident that in most cases, our full version will benefit you in more than one way and that you will definitely decide to keep using it. Don’t take our word for it though, go ahead and see for yourself.

These updates have taken a while, but we’re pretty happy with the end result. We hope you enjoy them too, and that you’ll continue to use CurdBee and introduce/recommend CurdBee to your colleagues, customers and friends who are looking for a simple and efficient online invoicing solution. While you check out these updates though, we’re off to the drawing board again to begin planning the Bee’s next iteration. As always, if you’ve got questions, comments and criticism, we’d love to hear from you, so do drop us a line. Thank you for your continued support, and we look forward to deliver the best billing experience in the months and years to come!

PS. If you’d like to see CurdBee previous home pages, here they are.

Our new PDF generation process is powered by WKHTMLTOPDF, which is a shell utility tool based on the webkit rendering engine and qt. It can seamlessly convert any HTML page to PDF while preserving all CSS styling and formatting, and well, that’s exactly what we wanted. The integration of this tool in to our Rails app was a cinch thanks to this plugin called WickedPDF.

We also redesigned the app’s Printer-friendly view to align with the new PDF view, and as some of you requested, now both the PDF and Printer-friendly versions of each invoice will show your custom logo.

Here is a sample PDF generated through CurdBee. If you’d also like to send easy and awesome PDF invoices like this, consider upgrading to CurdBee PRO today!

(It was picked by Slideshare editorial team as a featured presentation on 1st October 2009)

Believe it or not, the virtual economy of Second Life, a popular online computer game that lets users create a new reality for themselves, doubled in size last year. Users spent more than a billion dollars on virtual goods over the last year, compared to $360 million for the year before. Second Life’s economy is now larger than the economies of nations such as East Timor, Samoa and Dijibouti.

Read the full post here

The Javascript Libraries That Shape The New Web

According to the most recent data from California-based Web metrics company Net Applications, 27.2% of all Internet users are still running IE6, making it the most popular version of IE. By comparison, IE7 accounted for 23.1% of all browsers in action last month, while the newest edition, IE8, had a usage share of 12.5%.

Friends don’t let friends use IE6

To install the gadget on your site or blog, Google outlines just three easy steps,

1. Sign up for a Google Checkout seller account.
   Checkout will process your orders and help you attract new leads, convert more sales, and enjoy advanced fraud protection.
2. List the products you want to sell in a Google Docs spreadsheet.
   You’ll just need to create a copy of our template spreadsheet, and then replace the sample inventory with your own.
3. Place the Google Checkout store gadget on your website.
   You can embed your online store anywhere you’d like — on Google Sites, Blogger, or your personal website.

Start selling online with the Google Checkout store gadget

So let’s just get this out of the way: there is no such thing as a Google killer. No company is going to play David to their Goliath and slay them with a well-aimed stone from a slingshot. Google is here to stay.

There’s No Such Thing As A Google Killer

Forget thinking you are going to make any real money from record sales. Make your record cheaply (but great) and GIVE IT AWAY. As an artist you want as many people as possible to hear your work. Word of mouth is the only true marketing that matters.

To clarify:
Parter with a TopSpin or similar or build your own website, but what you NEED to do is this – give your music away as high-quality DRM-free MP3s. Collect people’s email info in exchange (which means having the infrastructure to do so) and start building your database of potential customers. Then, offer a variety of premium packages for sale and make them limited editions / scarce goods. Base the price and amount available on what you think you can sell. Make the packages special – make them by hand, sign them, make them unique, make them something YOU would want to have as a fan. Make a premium download available that includes high-resolution versions (for sale at a reasonable price) and include the download as something immediately available with any physical purchase. Sell T-shirts. Sell buttons, posters… whatever.

Read the full discussion