Joel Hainley

Work on Clik Clock is continuing at a rapid pace, there is still a lot of work to do but this weekend saw a major milestone reached. I am now able to enter/edit data using the UI that I have been designing for the Time Entry module. The other modules are all still being edited with the development UI but it’s getting closer. There’s something magical when the code you’ve been working on suddenly starts doing some small piece of what you’ve been envisioning. When it does enough that it can now support you in your efforts and you are able to “eat your own dogfood” it’s like it has taken it’s first breath and is now starting to take on a life of it’s own. It’s really a special time, at least for me.

Paul Graham ( the y combinator guy ) stated in the book Founders At Work that he wished they had setup an online store and sold SOMETHING so they would have had better insight into their customer experience. I can definitely see the value in this as I am more likely to overlook the bumps and bruises of something when I have my engineering hat on than when I have my user hat on. You get annoyed with things that you might not as a developer, watching fancy animations over and over again because they make the screen transitions cool comes to mind as something a developer might like but a user is going to eventually say “just get on with it.” I know powerpoint does a boatload of wipes and dissolves but I rarely see more than the default setting unless I’m watching the first handful of powerpoint presentations the person has made.

Anyways, I’m eating my own dogfood now and it tastes pretty damned good.

I’ve been working on a new set of features revolving around tracking user’s statistics relating to their performance with the question pools. I am now tracking information about each question a logged-in user sees, whether they answer it correctly and a timestamp. At the moment this information is simply being logged to a database without any visible changes to the system. I’m going to let this data accumulate over a week or two period until I have a decent set of data to test the new features.

It’s probably obvious if you think about it, but adaptive learning is really what I’m implementing here, as well as the ability for the user to see how they perform with each section and even each question. I’ll be able to show a user a graph of their performance with each question, section over time no matter whether they are simply doing practice test after practice test, or are systematically reviewing the question pools with the review tools.

This will generate a new study tool as well, because I will be able to generate tests in real-time that give them exposure to questions they haven’t seen before, or questions that they have had problems answering. It should be another fairly useful way for people to prepare for the amateur radio tests. It will also give me a chance to play with more featurs in jpgraph and to finally dig into the generation of sparklines.

In addition I’ve been working on a couple of other features that aren’t related to the above that should get hamtesting.com a lot of exposure in a very short amount of time. I’ll be announcing these new tools/features soon and at that time I’ll try to map out for you my strategy for how this is going to work. Although sometimes it’s hard to map out a business strategy when my main primary intention is to provide these tools for free to the amateur radio community.

Well it’s only been two weeks since I wrote the original entry about hamtesting.com needing some SEO love. I’ve been pretty busy since then and while I’m not into the top page yet, I’m starting to build some traffic. If you look to the previous post you’ll see that my numbers were pitifully low.

I setup google analytics, google webmaster tools, and setup the google sitemap generator and have been tweaking the content structure of the individual pages, adding in meta tags, as well as making the content, and site structure, a little more friendly to search engines. All of this has been positively wonderful for getting some decent traffic numbers for my first couple of weeks at getting started with this.

The other thing that I’ve done is modified the home page to be an better explanation of how to utilize the site to prepare for your ham radio test. I’ve also given users the ability to simply browse the question pool without having to utilize the test preparation system or the review system to see the questions in the pool for the question they are interested in. There are some other user experience things that I want to focus on over the next couple of weeks that might significantly help with user retention. Here’s the numbers for the last two weeks ( please note : this information is from google analytics, my base numbers from the original post were from adsense, I’m not sure how closely these systems agree on any given data point . )

186 visitors
2,088 page views

So given that the totals for nov2007-jan2008 were 230 page views. I think I’ve hit my originally stated goals for traffic, so now it’s time to come up with some new goals. I’d like to work towards getting the trend to increase and figure out how to crack the first page on google’s results for some of the search terms I’ve identified as being good terms to focus on.

History  

I finished the basic functionality of hamtesting.com in July 2007. I wrote the whole thing in Ruby/Rails in a week and then spent some time trying to deploy it, dealing with a bunch of issues related to inefficient xml processing etc, making it play nicely with apache and whatnot. While sitting at a Super Happy Dev House I finally had enough with trying to deploy Rails when I already knew all of the issues with PHP, so I sat down and rewrote it in PHP.   I launched the basic testing module of the site about a week later after I made it a little bit prettier( all css based ). I then wrote the review module and released that about 2 months later.

Getting The Word Out

I made a couple of lame attempts at getting some visitors to the site. I made some posts to some of the enthusiast groups and told people that I met about it, hoping to generate some interest. However, I naively thought that it would get itself found by the internet since it was vastly superior to most of the free testing sites, and even superior to most of the pay software/sites. Unfortunately it never seemed to generate much interest, I have some guesses at number of visitors in a given month and it’s VERY VERY OBVIOUS that the word ISN’T getting out.

 Using the Brain

Highly underrated, I used my brain to think about why people weren’t using the site. Then I typed in “ham testing” and “amateur radio testing” and “arrl testing” into google and started clicking back through the pages. I never did find my website. So how are others supposed to find it?

The Plan and The Goal

They say you need a goal and a plan to get there. So I have a goal. Hamtesting.com showing up on the first page of results when some keywords I’ve identified as being the most relevant are searched on. The plan is all laid out, I’d like to get triple the traffic of my biggest month thus far by the end of April, and then I’ll set some more goals.

The Baseline

In an effort to measure progress I’m going to put up some very unscientific numbers for the last two months :

january 2008 : 102 page impressions

december 2007 : 65 page impressions

november 2007 :  63 page impressions

So with those numbers as a basis perhaps we can see how effective my efforts are at generating some users for the site. I really believe the product is top notch and can improve people’s chances at passing their tests and learning what they have problems with quickly. It’s top notch, just gotta get the users!