Goodsol Solitaire Blog

New Site Design: Spider Wizard

Another site has updated to a new design:  Spider Wizard

This leaves only the two biggest product sites to go.

I'm falling a bit behind my schedule to get this done for a number of reasons.  Over the weekend, our air conditioner stopped working.  Of course, it was really, really hot.  It got up to 95 degrees one day.  This made it absolutely impossible to get any work done.  Fortunately, its working better now (although we are going to replace it).  Of course, now it is much cooler too.

I'm also concerned because the new site design has caused a considerable drop in sales.  So I have been testing to determine why.  I changed two things at once (site design and e-commerce provider).  This was in violation of the rule where you should only change one thing at a time, but since there was so much work involved, I wanted to change everything at once.

Now I'm going back and testing to see whether it is the new site design that is causing the drop in sales (that would really suck), or the new ecommerce provider.  It's going to take some more time to be sure, but the results of the first day of testing is suggesting which one it is.

New Site Design: FreeCell Wizard

The transition to the new web site design continues.

Today a fourth site has updated:  FreeCell Wizard.

The previous sites updated were Most Popular Solitaire, Solitaire Wizard, and Action Solitaire.

In other changes, I also completely re-did the main index page for Most Popular Solitaire.  It is now in a sales letter format like most of the other sites.  While I've had this format most of the time for most sites since 2001, I didn't do it for Most Popular Solitaire when the game was released this year.  There's been a lot of talk lately in various shareware forums about the performance of sales letter type pages, so I decided to give it a try for that product.  We'll see if it improves sales.

The site design changes has been sucking up most of my time lately.  There are still the 3 biggest sites left to go, including the big one of goodsol.com itself.

New Site Design: Action Solitaire

Our web site redesign project has now completed its 3rd site:  Action Solitaire.

The previous sites updated were Most Popular Solitaire and Solitaire Wizard.

I'm continuing to work on the remaining sites and I'm also watching the traffic and sales numbers closely on the changed sites.  So far, downloads appear to be unaffected. 

#1 For a Minute

Seth Godin had an interesting post over the weekend:  #1 at the Box Office

It turns out that in the last forty years, the length of stay of a typical bestseller at #1 is down by more than 85%. In other words, bestsellers used to be bestsellers for seven times as long as they are now.

This looks suspiciously like the trend noted in my previous post A Game a Day Keeps the Developer's Profits Away in the casual/indie games industry.  Hits are hits for only the fraction of the time they used to be.

Seth concludes:

If your marketing strategy requires you to hit #1 in order to succeed, you probably need a new marketing strategy.

CSS Designer

I'm looking for a CSS designer to fix a number of problems that have come up in our new web design.  I'm looking for someone with very good CSS skills.  If you are interested, contact me at [email protected].

New Site Design: Solitaire Wizard

The second site in our redesign project is now done.

Last Friday, the Most Popular Solitaire was updated.  This was described in a previous post.

Today, the Solitaire Wizard site is now live.

As you can see, the design is very similar, with a different color scheme and different graphics.

I'll be watching how these two sites perform and the 3rd site should update later in the week.  Most of my time right now is involved in getting the sites ready.

CatBlogging: Ace at Rest

I'm a little late this week with the catblogging, but here's a good one.

When I watch DVDs, Ace likes to come into the room and lie on the floor nearby.  She gets into the funniest positions, so this week I kept the camera close by to capture her.  This is one of her classics:

The characteristics of this position are one hind leg straight up in the air and the front paws in a begging position.  She can just lie like that for ages.

That is, until she gets peeved from all the camera flashes.

For more cat pictures, see the Friday Ark #87.

Stock Market

I am now rooting for a stock market crash.

New Site Design: Most Popular Solitaire

As mentioned earlier this week, we are working on a redesign of all of our product sites.

Today, the first new site design goes live:  The New Most Popular Solitaire Site

There are a few things to note about the design.  First, the screenshots down the left side is an idea I stole from Snood, who did that in their recent redesign.  I think it will work better than links, although of course the increased graphics will slow down the initial page load.

Second, note the javascript menu across the top.  I hope there won't be any problems with this, I've tested it in IE and Firefox.  I figure that almost everybody has JavaScript turned on these days, if you didn't you would run into so much that wouldn't work that you'd never be able to do much.

Finally, there's another big change that was made besides the site redesign.  I'll leave that for people who are looking closely to figure out for now.

Over the next few days I'll be watching to see if there are any problems.  The next site will be ready to switch over next week.  I'm starting with the lowest traffic/least sales sites and moving my way up, so that if any issues come up I can deal with them with them on the low traffic sites.  Once everything is clearly working, the high traffic sites will be switched over.  It's a process that I will expect will take a number of weeks.

I would appreciate people checking out the site and making sure it works.  My main concerns are page load times and whether the javascript menu works.  Comments and criticisms are welcome.   

Where are the Guns?

A fun read today on Creating Passionate Users:

What if Tech Companies Made Soduku?