A recent eHow tutorial describes how to use JotForm to create email lists and send them newsletters or your offerings. One of the greatest ways to increase your sales is to send your users periodical emails. Don’t overdo it. Send them sparsely. We usually send our users 2-3 times a year and only if we have a major news such as a new version or a discount.
Include real information and provide some value in your emails. Spend your time to make it look fine.
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It has been a week since we released JotForm iPhone App and the interest has been more than what we excepted. Over 450 users have installed JotForm App on their iPhone in the first week. Our users also provided nice reviews:
We’re very excited to announce that JotForm iPhone App is now available on iPhone App Store!
It is completely Free. Install it today to receive and access your form submissions anywhere! You can …
We have finally completed our JotForm iPhone app and submitted it to Apple for review. Once approved it will be completely free to all JotForm users. I would like to share how we developed the new application with user feedback.
SitePoint has always been one my favorite sites. In 2001, they featured one of my free scripts on their newsletter and pointed thousands of people to download it. It was a big rush to see so many users starting using my product. That’s how I started reading them. Back then, they were a small webmaster site and I’m glad they still kept that feeling of being close to their community.
SitePoint is running a nice article “The Foolproof Form Design Formula”. It is actually a chapters from their new book Fancy Form Design. The article suggests defining user personas for your forms and creating prototypes/wireframes to foolproof your form.
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We have recently switched to a new hardware architecture for our JotForm form builder service. I am pretty pleased with it because we were able to do it without any downtime or any problems for our users. As a result of this switch, JotForm now has much better high availability, speed and security. It was also a lot of fun to do it.
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Being a home seller in this economy must be pretty tough. There is help now! HomeSeller Software has just been released. Its goal is to provide home owners with all of the tools, knowledge and feedback necessary to succeed. Best of all, it is completely free.
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DogSearcher is one of coolest sites we have worked on. As a part of our Complete Membership Site Solution we provided design and development services. Dog Searcher is a community site for dog owners. Users can discuss various dog related topics on the forum, make posts on their blog, create profiles for their dogs and even sell their puppies to other dog lovers. This site is also very rich in content. There are many useful articles about taking care of dogs. They have even started using the new Memberkit Answers application to create a Q&A section on the site.
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For a growing startup, customer support is one of the most important things. You need to be talking to them to:
We receive many support emails every day. We also have multiple people responsible for our products. That’s why I researched a lot about the helpdesk solutions and found out that they are too complex, confusing and difficult to maintain. Instead we have been using Gmail for many years and it worked well for us.
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I am happy to announce that Memberkit 1.0 Beta is finally here!
Memberkit has probably been the biggest project we have ever completed for everyone in our team. We have been working on it for more than three years. Most people don’t know this but actually JotForm was a byproduct of Memberkit. We needed a really good form builder to make customizations easier and there came out JotForm. Today it is a very successful web service with over 100,000 users.
Memberkit has taken such a long time to complete because we really wanted to create something that is powerful but at the same time easy to use. Memberkit is on the low level a web development framework for non-programmers. Yes, you have read it correctly. It is a web framework. It is similar to web frameworks such as ruby on rails, but it does not require programming.
We are not advertising it in such a way though. Instead of attacking such a generic problem and creating something that might not be perfect for anybody, we have built something great for membership sites. We will not think about the future for the time being and just focus on making Memberkit a kickass product for social networking and subscription based sites.
Memberkit started small as an idea, grow into cool but unreachable spec, and after a very long and harsh development became an exciting product. We don’t know how successful it will be, but no matter what, we have created something we can be proud of rest of our lives.
So, what makes Memberkit such a killer application?
1. It is a web development framework for non-programmers
We think we have created an innovative solution for webmasters and web designers. Most people who create web sites are not programmers. If you are one of them, you have two options. You can either create simple static web sites or you can download and install web applications produced by commercial or open source programmers. Usually these applications are difficult to install and more importantly impossible to customize according to your needs. What if there was another option? What if you could write your own custom web applications without needing programmers or being a programmer? We think we have a product that makes this possible. Watch this video if you would like to see it with your eyes.
2. Growing number of social applications on the Memberkit App Gallery
One of the things we really wanted to make sure was to make it dead easy to share a web application you created and install an existing application from the App Gallery. They are both very easy now. You can share an application with a single click. You can also install an application with a single click.
3. Strong Subscriptions Features
We have worked with thousands of membership sites over the last decade. So, we are pretty familiar with their needs and changes happening in the industry. One of the most important reasons for the growth of the membership sites today is because people are increasingly getting used to paying for good content and features. You usually get what you pay for. So, Memberkit has built in recurring subscription payment features.
We are also strong believer of growing a product with user feedback. We would love to hear your questions and comments. Please take a look at our tour and demo. Feel free to explore Memberkit and let us know what you think.
Today, I was surprised to discover that I already have 74 Google Docs documents and pretty much stopped using Microsoft Office for the last year. It certainly did not happen intentionally. I think I’ve first started using Google Docs in 2006. I have been using more and more Google Docs since then. Today I have no need for Microsoft Office and I am surprisingly pretty happy about it.
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I am always fascinated with good writing. Maybe because it has many things in common with good software. A good user interface just flows. It is invisible. You get the task done without confusion. It might even be fun. Good writing has that quality as well. It captures the reader’s attention. Writing becomes invisible and the story becomes the reality. Both good writing and good software flows with the user. They provide a sense of accomplishment.
When I was in school, it took me all weekend to write a paper with couple of pages. Some people could write that in an hour. It was tough for me. Especially since English was my second language. But here is the interesting part. I always liked writing. It was tough but I enjoyed it a lot. I enjoyed every minute of it. My ideas were probably not that great. My writing was pretty bad. But it felt great to put things on paper.
In software, you start with a zero byte file. It is like an empty sheet of paper. Then you put things on it. Sometimes work on it for months. You get ideas and put them there. Instead of words, you code the ideas. Suddenly those ideas become reality for the user. If you are lucky, millions of people might even run the code you created.
A good writing is usually simple. Short sentences are good. Being to the point is good. Same applies to software. It is very hard work to make a user interfaces simple. The first draft you create is usually a very complex peace of mess. Then you work on it and refine it. You Keep it Simple, Stupid. KISS principle applies both to writing and software.
[Some thoughts I have had while reading a book called “On Writing Well” by Williaam Zinsser.]
Keane Angle made a nice video tutorial about JotForm. We liked it so much that we are planning to add it to our Tutorials page.
It is 2008. What do you do when you need to create a new web site?
There are many Content Management Systems but they are still very difficult to install, use and customize. Only a tiny number of sites would like to have a 3-column phpNuke look, but still pretty much all CMSes assume that is what you want.
If you are a programmer, maybe you can spend hours, mess with lots of php files and come up with a hack theme that would make it barely look like the kind of design you would like, but you are an exception. Most of the people who build sites are not programmers.
We have been hard at work for the last year to create a new kind of membership software. Our main goal was to keep things easy to use and easy to customize. So we developed a new kind of templating system that is both simple and flexible.
Basically, you can create any kind of design and our Memberkit templating system will just accept and work with it.
You can create a new page and upload it into your dev folder and it will just become part of your site with the design you created.
Stay tuned for more news about Memberkit. We will be releasing it on October 29th.
We have just started using DropBox here at Interlogy offices and we are really excited about it. The Mac application works like a charm but they also support Windows and Linux versions.
Basically you have Dropbox folder on your computer and whatever you put there, it also shows up on other users you are sharing the folder with. It is fast and easy to use. We will probably start using it instead of email attachments. Since you can also send comments using the tool.
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Podcasts are great to listen whether you are lying on the beach or stuck on the rush hour traffic. This episode of BizTech Podcast features JotForm. Check it out. BizTech Podcast is bi-weekly show designed to inform the small business and small business owner about targeted web sites and other technology.
We were also featured on the EdTech Weekly previously. EdTech is a pretty popular podcast for educators.
We have introduced a new product called “Full Membership Site Solution” last month and I am quite impressed with the amount of interest it received. We develop membership software that power thousands of web sites. So, we have been regularly receiving requests from our clients to not only provide the software but also to develop whole site for them.
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It is amazing how time passes by so quickly. It has been almost 8 years since the first version of Profile Manager Premium came out. At that time, I was still a computer science student. It all started with some free web site development I was doing for a non-profit organization. I was only doing it for fun but I also believed in the organization. I shared the scripts I developed on the web. Which lead to some small consulting gigs which lead me to post some more free scripts on the web. Two of the scripts I posted in 1999 became pretty popular among small websites. One was called “Netcard” and the other one was “Profile Manager”. They were both simple scripts which made it possible for small sites to easily let visitors create profiles on their sites. There was no term called “social networking” at that time. The biggest profile site was “Yahoo! Profiles” so most of the users wanted something similar to that.
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When we design software our goal is to make complex things easy for webmasters. So, we have to constantly think about the user interface. We sometimes redesign same functionality many times until we find a way that is easy to use but still flexible.
Today, we had another breakthrough idea on the new product we are working on. I define a breakthrough idea as one that make you say “how in the world I didn’t think of that before”. They are simple and elegant solutions to seemingly complex problems. Before we come up with an idea like that, we usually have a big mess. We are stuck and cannot find a good way out. We are almost ready to assume that there are no good solutions. We have thought of everything but the ideas we have are at best acceptable. They are not great. We don’t get excited when we think about implementing them. I think this is an important point. If we are not excited about what we are doing, we are probably doing it wrong.
Just came back from my two weeks in Bodrum. I like doing some light reading on vacation. Business novels are especially go well under the sun since they are both enjoyable easy-reads and still can help you learn and grow.
The first business novel I read was The Goal couple of years ago. It was a great read and very thought provocative. After that I tried to find and read as many business novels as I can. Unfortunately, there are not many in this genre. I also did not find any web resources on business novels. So, today I am sharing the best business novels I have read. If you know any good ones missing below please feel free to post on the comments section.
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Aytekin Tank is cofounder of Interlogy Internet Technologies. The company that created the popular JotForm web form builder. Developing web applications is his passion.