Approval process

Submitting to an Envato marketplace is somewhat like adding a product to Apple’s app store. You have to go through an approval process before your product is made available to buy. They also receive a percentage of sales which varies depending on whether you are selling exclusively through them (I’m not). I don’t mind admitting that my original submission, about two weeks ago, was rejected. It wasn’t without good reason though: I had provided the application exactly as it is found on this website and that proved to be a useful lesson about context.

On this – its own website – you can see visual information about what the UI of the application is like – screengrabs, colours etc. It is also clear from the Pro page that there is online documentation. Outside that context though, these clues are absent. The reviewer rightly thought that the application was insufficiently documented and didn’t get a good sense of what the UI is like from the supplied screengrabs and live demo. So they rejected it.

I spent the time since improving those supporting materials. I re-made my live demo, created new screengrabs (which I may put in place of the existing ones) and made local HTML versions of the support documents, which I included in a special version of the application download for CodeCanyon. I may add those to the regular download, but I think it’s best to keep documentation online so unless there’s significant demand I’ll leave it as-is. In response to these changes, the application was accepted.

Pricing

Pricing is a big part of this marketplace experiment. Again like the app store, a developer must accept that you will make less money per-sale with the aim of making more sales to compensate for that. Many developers, particularly those with Mac products that pre-date the Mac app store and continue to be sold outside it, actually charge less in the app store than they do on their own website. Money by Jumsoft is one example.

I should point out at this point: the pricing of simpleContact Pro on CodeCanyon is not under my control. Envato set the price, and adjust it over time. I will periodically review whether or not it is appropriate to continue to sell there. I don’t wish to upset existing customers.

The price of the developer license (they call it the “extended license”) on CodeCanyon is almost the same, at $55 (vs $60 here). The single domain license though is considerably less at $11 (vs $25 here). In both cases the price increases by $2 if you have not bought pre-paid credits in the marketplace. It’s up to you to decide which is more convenient for you – to pay by credit card on CodeCanyon or directly to me by PayPal here. I promise to support all customers equally.

I’d appreciate any feedback you have.

There are only two requirements:

1) You must be a simpleContact Pro license holder (single domain or developer).

2) You understand that beta builds are likely to have bugs and accept full responsibility for any consequences of using a beta build on a live website.

I’ll even offer a little incentive If you become a beta tester and help to identify a problem with a beta build, I will upgrade your license to developer status.

Like the simpleContact Lite 1.21 update, it brings the application’s look and feel in line with this website, squashes a couple of bugs and adds two features that users have asked for – CSV export for the inbox and an SMTP port setting in the config file.

See the release notes for more information. Existing Pro users can download the update from the new support page.

Here’s a video that walks through the installing simpleContact Lite. Hopefully it clarifies the process for you. It’s only about two minutes long, but believe me it took longer than that to make!

In case you’re curious, I used ScreenFlow for the Mac to record and edit this video. It’s a well designed, powerful tool and well worth the price – I highly recommend it. The text editor I used was TextMate and the FTP client was Transmit.

The music is called Green and Gorgeous and is available from AudioJungle.

I’ll be adding more screencasts to the YouTube channel over the next few months. Stay tuned!

• New logo, colour scheme and favicon
• All links updated for simplecontactform.com (also fixes error on line 1 bug in update check)
• Fixed a layout problem on the logout page in Firefox 3
• Various CSS improvements
• Tested against the Google Chrome web browser
• Fixed a security vulnerability in password reset function
• Fixed a rare issue that could cause the installation script to fail
• Added SMTP port option to config file
• Includes PHPMailer 2.0.4 for PHP 4
• Attribution link added to forms
• Online support documentation replaces PDF file

See the release notes for more information. Go get it!

I’ve made a Facebook page for simpleContact to dip my toe in the water. I’ve got lots of ideas for this page but as a sweetener I’ve decided to do a regular monthly giveaway.

Monthly giveaway for fans

On or around the first of every month, I’ll give a single domain license of simpleContact Pro (worth $25) to a fan of the Facebook page. I might do a random draw one month, a poll the next, whatever takes my fancy so watch this space!

Become a fan of the Facebook page today, and you could win very soon!

You can’t buy trust

It helps if you can minimise a person’s risk. That’s why simpleContact Lite is more than just a free PHP contact form solution. You can also use it to confirm that simpleContact Pro will install successfully on your website. Its interface is consistent with Pro, and you can migrate your settings and data when you decide to upgrade.

We all want to try before we buy. That’s why there’s a live demo that you can use to explore the admin interface in full and decide whether it will satisfy your needs.

… But there’s no substitute for unbiased word of mouth. Proof that someone went first, spent their money, and were happy with the result. Happy enough that they wanted to share the experience.

Don’t take my word for it

It’s time I shared some of the feedback I’ve received since I released these applications. I’ve added a buzz page to this website which contains comments from real users of Lite and early-adopters of Pro.

Businesses, design agencies, freelance web designers and marketers – it’s quite a mixed bag! Maybe something in there means something to you.

On an unrelated note, I completed a maintenance upgrade to the support forums last weekend. It’s now dressed in a snappy shade of green and should be more useful than before.

Both simpleContact Pro and Lite play nice with the popular blogging platform WordPress. They’re PHP/MySQL based so they can be hosted on the same website, even sharing a database. As a matter of fact they’re both installed on this website…

If you’ve installed WordPress you’ll find that the process with SCP is familiar (which is no coincidence). However, SCP is not a WordPress plugin. It’s a separate and self-contained application. This means that some people might prefer it to be more integrated with their blog that it currently is.

Enter Stephen Meehan of d3creative, a talented designer and personal friend of mine. He’s wrote a tutorial on his blog explaining how to add the simpleContact Pro contact form to a WordPress page template. It involves a bit of copying and pasting, but there’s nothing to intimidate someone who’s used to bending WordPress to their will.

Let me know what you think! I’m tempted to record a screencast video to describe this process…

Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress) said…

“I believe that there aren’t any more ‘killer features’ in software, there are 10,000 killer features and everyone has a different 20.”

He may have a point there! That’s why, since the original release of simpleContact Pro, I’ve been busy writing “hacks” – walkthroughs for adding functionality that isn’t currently present in SCP but might be just the thing you need. These are posted to the support forums.

The latest post could be considered an early pass at building in support for the popular email newsletter system Campaign Monitor. I often recommend Campaign Monitor for sending emails to a mailing list – it has a comprehensive feature-set, great design and the cost of sending a campaign (even to thousands of subscribers) is trivially low.

SCP 2.0 includes a CSV export feature that makes it easy to output your mailing list, ready to import into Campaign Monitor.

It could be easier though. It could be seamless.

This new hack uses the Campaign Monitor API so that when a user confirms their mailing list subscription, they automagically appear in your list inside Campaign Monitor.

Check out the Campaign Monitor support for double opt-in mailing list hack. I’d love to hear your feedback on it – you can help guide a built-in implementation for a future version of simpleContact Pro.

To paraphrase his website, Ian Lurie is an internet marketer with 14 years’ experience. He is the president of Seattle-based Portent Interactive. He blogs at Conversation Marketing, wrote a book by the same name (which I reviewed on my personal blog), and recently co-authored Web Marketing For Dummies. He’s also on Twitter.

He recently launched a new consultancy service called 10Things, aimed at small businesses. It includes an appraisal of your site, 10 recommendations to improve it and an hour’s discussion with Ian himself. This costs $500 which isn’t pocket-change, but if you’re unwilling to invest that much in expert advice perhaps you should cut your losses and quit.

He announced this new service with a blog post and competition to win one of three 10Things sessions. I was fortunate enough to be one of the three, so on Thursday night we spoke via iChat.

Since this website is new I was a little nervous about inviting direct criticism. It felt a little like handing my homework in to a teacher and waiting to hear my result! In truth, there would be no better time, and thankfully I didn’t get an “F-, See me after class.” It was a very positive experience and I am more confident than ever that this website is on the right track.

It would be unfair to reproduce his advice in full, but I’ll touch on three points that relate specifically to this website:

Uniformity in design

This is my most urgent priority, and something that Ian also identified. In order to get the website launched without any delay, I postponed some tasks. The blog, forum and product documentation need to be integrated with the navigation and graphical identity of the site. I will also modify the colour schemes of the applications themselves in their next releases.

This will result not only in the improved customer confidence that comes from visual consistency, but also the SEO benefit of making sure the site’s pages are properly interlinked.

Screencasts

I’d already thought about creating some screencasts (video clips that show the application’s behaviour), but Ian confirmed the necessity of this. All the written explanation in the world is no substitute for simply showing the the user what is meant. I’ll look forward to making screencasts for this site next year. I think it will be fun!

Trust

Well written copy is important, but trust is hard to come by on the Internet. Ian suggested that I put more of a personal stamp on the site, explaining who I am and linking to other parts of my online identity. I should also offer social proof of the product’s popularity, which I hope the buzz section I am working on will help to do.

Over the next few months I have a lot of work to do! I’ll be putting a lot of Ian’s advice into practice and I hope you will see the benefits. I look forward to going back for 10 More Things in future.