Getting Your WordPress Byline to Display
Posted on June 9, 2008
Filed Under WordPress, php | Leave a Comment
The other day a friend of mine started a new blog called Transformation of the Suns. He found a WordPress theme he liked, but after he added his first post, he noticed that his name didn’t appear on the page.
He asked me if I could help.
If you are an expert in php programming this would be easy. But for those of you who are not, here are the easy steps to customize your WordPress blog so that your name appears under your blog post title.
The first step is to edit the index.php page of your theme. You will find a line of code something like this: <div class=”main_title”><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark”><?php the_title(); ?></a></div>
You need to insert this small piece of code just before the closing </div> tag. Here is what you need to insert: <h5>by <?php the_author() ?></h5>
Obviously, it doesn’t have to be surrounded by a <h5> tag, but you do need to format it somehow. In this case, I opened up the style sheet and added a h5 heading and styled it appropriately, giving it a letter spacing of .4em.
And there is one more step. You need to add the same small bit of code to the single.php page to the same line as on the index.php page. When finished, the line looks like this: <div class=”main_title”><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark”><?php the_title(); ?></a><h5>by <?php the_author() ?></h5>
</div>.
That’s it.
This little bit of tweaking is important if you ever want to have a guest writer create a post on your blog. Everybody wants to receive their due credit.
How To Build A List Of Subscribers
Posted on May 15, 2008
Filed Under opt-in mailing list | Leave a Comment
If you want to build a list of subscribers, know this: every online business provides great service to generate satisfaction among their customers. As each and every customer receives satisfaction over their products or the services they get, there is a great chance that they will become a return customer and buy again. Better yet, they will recommend you to other people that could generate more business for you and your site.
As more traffic is driven to your site, you can entice many of them to subscribe to your mailing list or opt-in list. This is a list where in website visitors agree to be sent promotional materials such as newsletters, catalogs and such that could keep them updated about your site or the niche of your site. These promotional materials are sent via e-mail to the members of the list in different time intervals.
When using e-mail as the media of your marketing and advertisements, you eliminate the need for high costs. Email is free and if you can manage to make your own promotional advertisements you can also save a bundle there. With an opt-in subscribers list, you are pretty sure that what you are sending out is received, viewed and read by the subscribers and not simply being deleted. They have signed up for service and have consented in receiving it.
This means that there are constant reminders to your subscribers about all your products, new products and services as well as any promotions and special deals you are having. There is also the chance that they can be forwarded to other potential customers as they tell their friends and families about you and your site.
Of course you should be also aware that a subscriber may unsubscribe when they feel that they are not getting what they want or expected. Make sure that they are satisfied with your opt-in marketing strategies and keep them excited in receiving your newsletters and catalogs. Here are some tips that can help you build a list of eager subscribers.
Make your promotional materials interesting and fun. Try to use a little creativity but not too over artsy. Build around what your product or service is about. For example; if you are selling car parts, put some pictures of what is new in the auto parts world, a new wing door possibly that can fit any car and make it look like a Lamborghini.
Try to research what people are looking for, these way, you stay one step ahead of them all the time and you will be their bearer of new tidings. They will be eager to receive what you are sending them because they new you always have fresh and new things to share with them.
Write good articles that can be very informational but light at the same time. If your subscribers enjoy your articles, they will go to your site by clicking the links that you will be putting on your newsletter to read some more. You can provide articles that can connect to many people. Be diverse in your articles. Put something humorous, then put something informational, then put something that has both.
Are you wary about this because you don’t like writing? No problem, there are many professional and experienced article writers that can do the job for you for minimal fees. They know what they are doing and can provide the need that you have for your newsletters, the money that you pay for your articles are going to be met by the many sign-ups and the potential profit from the sales that you will get.
Create and send an E-book to your customers about anything that is related to your business or site. Use your knowledge and expertise in the field you have chosen to help other people who are similarly interested. Offer this e-book for free. You can write about anything informational and helpful to your subscribers. For example; you can do manuals and guides in so many things. This e-book could be used as a reference for many people.
Share this e-book with everyone, even other sites; just make sure that they don’t change the links in the e-book that will lead people to your site. If you want, you can always get some people to write it for you just like your articles. Your investment once again will be covered by the great marketing this will generate.
Add e-coupons in your newsletters that will help them avail to special discounts. Put a control number in your e-coupon so that they can only be used once. When people get discounts that can be found in your newsletters, they will be eager to receive your newsletter in anticipation of what you are promoting next.
If your subscribers can get benefits from your newsletters, they will be very eager to receive them. Just don’t flood your mailing list with mails so that you don’t annoy your subscribers.
In Closing… And a Call to Action!
This is valuable information:
If you aim for success, you must do everything within your means to achieve that. You just don’t go on sitting there in your house complaining about not getting as much profit as you expect. You have to keep moving. You have to pour in and invest enough time, money and effort to have profitable results.
In doing Internet business, you must aim just the same. You should maximize all of your Internet marketing strategies, given the wide market that your business will be exposed to. Imagine the whole online community as potential clients!An opt-in list is the best, most effective and smartest option that you can make to make it big.
It is one thing to stay in business and it is another thing to have a profitable business. So if you will be allowed to choose, make use of the building list to ensure that profits will keep coming in.
And building a list will definitely work for your benefit. This will ensure that you can maintain close contact and a good relationship with your clients, especially the frequent visitors.
This will also save you money, time and effort because once you come up with a new product or new information, you know exactly who you will send updates to because you have a definite market.
This is one aspect that you will have to maintain to have a steady source of income at the least. Then the rest of your efforts will be to make the number of your regular clients grow.
Some pointers in building your opt-in list:
- You should put a ‘subscribe link’ or ‘subscribe box’ in your web site. It is advisable to put it on all the pages. Then make sure that it is strategically positioned, meaning it has to be easily located by the visitors. The upper right hand corner of the page would be a good position.
- Promote your website and promote it even more to make give it more exposure and to get more subscribers.
- Come up with contests or give away freebies and goodies that will require visitors to give out their email ads to be able to join.
- Give out information, articles and updates to your clients with your links in it. Make sure that the information will be relevant to the client.
- Offer free courses to your visitors. This will also help maintain a good relationship with your subscribers.
- Use your signature also to make your opt-in list expand. Every time you send out messages the link information should be included.
- Do some networking too. Join some forums or discussions and build relationships with the people there. This way will also be a good way for you to get more contacts and clients.
- At the same time you should also know what you should avoid in building an opt-in list. There is one thing that you should keep in mind as the don’t’s of building a list.
- NEVER EVER spam your subscribers. It is best that you get permission from your subscribers, or else you might end up with a bad reputation.
- Avoid ABRASIVE pop-ups (though not all). They can sometimes annoy the visitors. There are also pop-up blockers now. Your effort here might end up futile.
- You should also refrain from flooding your subscribers with information. You might end up as an annoyance that you might not get a favorable result. There may be times that you’ll give relevant information, but your clients may just dismiss it.
- The benefits of having many regular subscribers are undeniable. They will definitely keep your business going and you will definitely enjoy the profits that will come in. Just remember that things don’t end there.
- Once you’ve build up on a substantial opt-in list, make sure that you maintain it well. Keep in contact with your subscribers. Send them updates. Give out special offers and helpful tips. Freebies will be helpful too.
Just follow this and you’ll see… things can only get better!
Big Success with an Opt-in Mailing List
Posted on May 14, 2008
Filed Under opt-in mailing list | 1 Comment
Creating an opt-in mailing list is the number one thing you can do to make your website profitable – and influential. Once you gain the trust of your readers, they are more than willing to buy from you. And not just once, but again and again.
Before revealing the secrets of the trades, here are myths and fallacies that need to be cleared before one indulges into building an opt-in list. These marketing misconceptions could pose so much of an obstacle towards your profiting well from your business.
Not a lot of people use email
Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing methods nowadays simply because virtually almost all people use email. Check on those email fields or blanks required to be filled up on various forms needed in processing different transactions. A person without an email address is tantamount to a person without an online home, which is one big shameful truth for this generation.
Email marketing campaigns can offend a lot of people
The not-so secret way to surmount this dilemma is through permission-based advertising. There’s no harm in trying after asking for permission.
It’s stupid to send email to all the people
The key to this predicament is to have a very discerning eye on who to email and who to not email. Better look for some metrics on how to know which group of people would give you high ROI or return on investment.
The Real Deal with Building Opt-in List
After clearing the fog regarding email marketing myths, here’s how one can benefit from employing the power of email marketing campaigns - building an opt-in list.
However, building an opt-in list is not a piece of cake particularly for the uninitiated. Here is a roundown of tips on how to succeed in this kind of marketing endeavor.
1. Strategic Collection of Data
Know which information from your audiences will help you in lowering expenses and/or make sales flourish. Devise a tactic to make people voluntarily provide you with the information necessary to create higher conversion.
Overload of data is not good. Ask only for opt-in, with their full name and email addresses. Make sure that the profiles that you gather are updated to aid in improving the relevance, timeliness and satisfaction from each deal you make.
2. Good Implementation
Old adage says it all, “action speaks louder than words”. This easily translates to the difficulty one has to undergo during the execution of his or her email marketing efforts. It’s a good thing that various methods, often low-cost, abound to hasten and facilitate the building up of one’s opt-in database.
Tracking your email marketing results can pose great hardship, too. Technology and relevant sources should be employed in making this aspect of your marketing a lot manageable. Your high traffic groups of opt-ins with the greatest result should be taken noted of.
Utilizing the Secrets Of Opt-in Mailing Lists
Emails are replacing regular mails from the post office. Not only because it is cheaper, since you do not need to buy a stamp, it’s also definitely faster. Emails can be sent in as fast as five seconds, depending on the server, anywhere in the world.
No doubt emails are being used to distribute newsletters, promotional mails, and other stuff. How then would you be able to round up email addresses to send those marketing mails you have? Here is where an opt-in list comes in.
An opt-in list is a directory of email address you can send to those mails to. Though it seems to be easy to find email addresses, if you are talking thousands in numbers, it is going to be hard. Besides, you have to determine the recipient of the email. You wouldn’t want your readers mostly male if you are selling lipsticks, right?
A good opt-in list should include the profile of the email address owner. Here are tips on how to create a comprehensive opt-in list for target market.
Set up a promotion or a freebie.
Not all the best things in life are free, as they say. But you can definitely try to give something out for sure. You can see this done all over the web. Free screensavers, free games, free download of programs. And what do they need from you? They just ask for an email address, your name and a little something more about you. Then you can place a check box on the registration form for sending of email. For sure, you can think of something to give out as well.
Write and write some more
There are some web magazines where in readers can submit their writings for a particular topic. If you had a chance to do so, add a link to your article providing information about what you are trying to promote. Some readers of your article may enjoy your work so much they’d like to contact you, so don’t forget to leave your email address too.
Pose an easy opt-out option
People who like to join your opt-in list would, along the way may want to opt out of it somehow. People who are wary of joining may not join at all if they see that it would be near impossible to remove their email address from the listing. Show them that it is as easy to opt-out as it is opting in.
Check other’s strategy too
It would be better if you can find a partner in generating an opt-in list. This way, you can split the expenses and both of you can share the list generated. It will be best to partner with a company that has a business similar to your own line. Both of you can profit more should that be the case.
Use offline ways too
You can put up a small raffle preferably in a supermarket for a certain item they buy. You can place an email address opt-in part in the raffle entry to add to your list. This way, you’d also know the buying preferences of the participants if you mark the entries systemically.
Creating an opt-in list entails a lot of work and funds. You should outline how much you will spend in creating an opt-in list. People appearing at opt-in lists are sales prospects. They are those interested in a certain product that you may be selling. Obtaining an optimal opt-in list would boost your sales up so these tools are undoubtedly essential.
Acquire an opt-in list now or generate one. Either way, you are reaching to people that can be your one of your treasured customers for a long period time!
Four Crucial Things You Need To Do To Build your List
Online marketing may have developed a sudden surge these past few years, but many in the know how have felt its rise even from way then. As more Internet based businesses are put up, the need to develop new marketing skills and knowledge based on this new medium have arisen. More and more marketing strategies are being discovered and developed to cope with the changing face of business the business world.
The demand for online marketing tips and strategies have drastically grown and a new form of business has been born, Internet marketing strategies. While there are companies that are all too eager to help your site and business build a clientele for a fee, there also many ways that can spread the word about your sites subsistence in a more cost free way. One of this is Opt-in email marketing, also known as permission marketing.
Opt-in marketing requires the permission of a willing customer to subscribe to your marketing materials, materials that take form in newsletters, catalogs and promotional mailings via e-mail. The more opt-in marketing mail is sent, the more chances there is to bag sales and more sales. To do this, you must build a list of all those who wants to subscribe to your opt-in marketing list.
From your list, you will get your targeted customer, this is a good list since they already have shown interest in what you have to show and sell since they have willingly signed in for your list. These are the people who have liked what they have seen in your site and have decided they want to see more and maybe even purchase whatever product or service your company and site has to offer.
Many people would think that building their lists would take hard work and a lot of time to build and collect names and addresses. This is not so, it takes a bit of patience and some strategies but in doing this list, you open your site and your business to a whole new world of target market. Take the effort to take your business to a new level, if traffic increase and good profits are what you want, an opt-in list will do wonders for your business venture.
There are many sources and articles in the Internet available for everyone to read and follow in building a list. Sometimes they may be confusing because there are so many and there are different ways. Different groups of people would have different approaches in building an opt-in list, but no matter how diverse many methods are, there are always some crucial things to do to build your list. Here are four of them.
1) Put up a good web form in your site that immediately follows the end of your content.
While some may say this is too soon to subscribe for a website visitors application, try to remember that your homepage should provide a quick good impression. If somehow a website visitor finds something that he or she doesn’t like and turns them off, they may just forget about signing up.
A good web form for subscribing to an opt-in list is not hard to do. Just write a simple short statement about how they would like to see more and get updated about the site. Then there should be an area where they could put in their names and e-mail address. This web form will automatically save and send you the data’s inputted. As more people sign in, your list will be growing.
2) As mentioned in the first tip, make your homepage very, very impressive.
You need to have well written articles and descriptions of your site. Depending on what your site is all about, you need to capture your website visitor’s fancy. Make your site useful and very easy to use. Do not expect everyone to be tech savvy. Invest in having good programming in your site, make your graphics beautiful but don’t over do it.
Don’t waste your time making the homepage too overly large megabyte wise. Not all people have dedicated T1 connections, the faster your site gets loaded, the better. Go for a look that borders between simplicity and sophisticated knowledge.
3) Provide good service and products.
A return customer is more likely to bring in more business. Even then and now, a satisfied customer will recommend a business always. Word of mouth and recommendations alone can rake in more business than an expensive ad. As your clientele roster grows so shall your list. With more members on the list, the more people will get to know about what you have new to offer.
4) Keep a clean and private list.
Never lose the trust your customers have entrusted you. If you provide e-mails to others and they get spammed, many will probably unsubscribe to you. Remember, a good reputation will drive in more traffic and subscribers as well as strengthen the loyalty of your customers.
Three Quick And Easy Ways To Build A Profitable Opt In List
Here I will offer more advice, for those who have started an opt-in list and have failed, you can rejuvenate your failed venture. For those who are starting, here are three quick and easy ways to build a profitable opt-in list:
1) Get your customers to trust you and your products first.
Just launching your opt-in list would not make you an expert and a believable seller. Put many articles first before you start an opt-in list. Write about the topic you know and have started and used for your site. Try to put forums first to gain knowledge about your customers about their wants and needs and target those wants and needs.
Join forums from other sites as well. Provide expert advices and recommendations. When you feel that people trust you already, you will be able to start your own opt-in list. You can build a base as well with other forum users. You can ask them to join your list. Friends are always good customers. Put up a link to your site so that they may be able to see what you’re business is all about.
The certain truth is, the money will only come in when the consumers and subscribers believe and trust in you. They want a product or service that could be a good exchange for their money. People are not going to buy something out of your recommendation if they don’t know you.
2) Find a product or service that people want and need.
Although it may not be your forte, if you provide a service and product that you have researched and learned about well, you can carry it on forward. Invest your time, effort and money that you could sell as well as the buyers or subscribers of your opt-in list can use.
While it is true that it is best to sell something that you have interest in, there are not many people who have the same interest as you if you decide to sell something that is not entirely popular or profitable. Do your research well and you would see the profits come in. Also provide your subscribers with promotional material that they could actually use and spread around.
3) Make friends with other opt-in list users.
This is basically beneficial especially if it is someone who has already launched a successful opt-in list. These are people that have the experience in this venture and experience is still the best teacher. While there are many articles available for you in the Internet to use, there is nothing like getting a first hand account from someone you trust.
Experienced opt-in list users will be able to tell you what to do and what not to do because they have gone through it. While different situations occur for different people, the general concept can still be very helpful. There are many things to avoid and these people will be able to tell you which ones.
Important! Building a profitable opt-in list don’t just happen overnight. There are many preparations and effort to do. Opt-in lists are built from scratch, as your list grows, you should also maintain the quality of your list. Keep it organized and manageable. Get or hire help if need be, just make sure that your subscribers are happy and satisfied and they will be willing to buy from you.
Interview with KoolMoves’ Richard Ward
Posted on May 12, 2008
Filed Under Flash Animation | 4 Comments
Recently I had the pleasure to do an extended interview with software creator, Richard Ward, the man with the original vision to create KoolMoves (www.KoolMoves.com). He teamed up with programming powerhouse Bob Hartzell and the rest is history. For those of you not familiar with it, KoolMoves is a software animation product that is changing the experience of more and more people on the Internet. For instance, the highly popular Internet course, Teaching Sells, which trains people from around the world on how to build Interactive Learning Environments, recommends KoolMoves as one of the tools for that purpose, and teaches it to their students. KoolMoves has not only received praise from the press (PC Magazine gave it a five star rating), it also inspired tremendous loyalty among its customers, unsurpassed in the software industry.
To find out how this all came about was the motivating force for this interview. As you will see, his story epitomizes the famous words of Joseph Campbell: “Follow your bliss.”
_____________________
What is KoolMoves about?
I’ve been thinking a lot about what KoolMoves is all about. We really want to make it accessible and for it to have the power of Flash in a way that is simple. KoolMoves is our main product and we also have Flashy Effects, which is a lite version featuring a part of KoolMoves focused mainly on animated effects for text and images.
Adobe now owns the Flash product. We try to keep our product very streamlined.
What I consider a stroke of extremely good luck is that we started getting extremely loyal fans, customers who go out of their way to help other customers on the forum. We have a great forum with a lot of great sharing and expertise.
It’s a very comfortable place for a lot of people to hang out and show off their work. KoolMoves is all that. It’s a community, a very committed community of users. It’s a different approach to getting access to the power of the Flash format.
I was talking to Bob (co-owner Bob Hartzell) yesterday and he said you were the one with the original vision or inspiration for this company.
Right
When did that you get that vision?
Well, let’s see. It was probably around 1996. I’d been familiar with an early program that did vector graphics on the old DOS operating system. It was done in a very approachable and fun way and it was called Fantavision. Anyway, I really enjoyed that program and I taught it to children in private schools and also at museums. Brookgreen Gardens, here in South Carolina, for instance, has various extension courses. Anyway, you know how much kids like to make drawings. I was able to help the kids make their drawings move. I would help kids create stories. An entire class of kids would create and weave their individual animations into a larger movie that had a coherent plot.
Coming from that experience, I originally wanted to make a product for children and at that same time it was becoming clear that Flash was very appealing a very huge collection of different interests having to do with creating websites or making slide shows, or whatever.
As our product and the capabilities of the Flash format evolved, I became glad that we had a general purpose program, and not just a children’s program, because we could address some of the more sophisticated needs of people who are actually using the scripting environment, the action script environment. And each year the power of the Flash format has continued to grow.
It’s mind-boggling. It’s like a smaller microcosm of the web and how many different things are done on the web. It has so many capabilities, like being able to have video. We have video players and MP3 players that are available on the product. The users are very creative people and they have come up with all sorts of ways to connect with other scripting languages. I think you would really enjoy our forum, if you got a look at it, seeing what other people are up to.
This year, fairly soon probably, we will be up to date on the latest version of action scripting, which is called Action Scripting 3. Very powerful! People are doing so many new things with scripting now that it has an order of magnitude more speed.
So, in 1996, Fantavision was the first animation program you used?
I actually go back farther than that with that program. I had been part of some of the earlier companies that taught the use of computers to children. So I would go to various locations. Those were the days when most schools didn’t have computers so I would lug the computers around. I would set them up and the kids would have access to it. They had a particular curriculum that involved many programs. Fantavision was just one of the programs that was fairly popular in that type of business. It was the days of DOS. DOS was so prevalent that it took a while for Windows to really catch on.
Anyway, I liked working with kids the most but as you know, a lot of people still have the kid alive in them and they get to express themselves, either through making animations or making multimedia pieces, or whatever, with our product.
But it is not just that type of user. We have people who use it in a very formal way on websites. We have every type of user imaginable.
When you first had the vision for this company, did you imagine that it would take off as well as it has?
Well, I guess that it has done better that I thought it would do. I knew there was a growing need to have a format that was more powerful and more controllable than HTML web page approach. But It just took off much more quickly than I expected. People needed to have control over things. I mean, you can, with a lot of tuning and different techniques get many different things to happen on the Internet, but usually you are using this, that or another technology and kind of weaving them together. And it gets to be a little cumbersome. So, I think, the response is better than I thought it would be because I didn’t know we would be fusing so much into one package, and that is why the response has been bigger than I anticipated. A lot of technologies are still separate, and webmasters and webpage designers have to be a jack of all trades to get their web page up.
That’s a long answer to that question. But of course on the other hand, I did sometimes think that there would be a much broader response and much more of a movement towards animation on the web. It takes time to mature these things and to find the right mix of animation, to know when people viewing the web will enjoy it, and how they will enjoy it, and what would be the best use of it to make various types of web pages look just that much more sophisticated and communicate better.
So would you say that the whole concept of this company was the Joseph Campbell thing of “following your bliss?”
Yes, actually. It was a dream. And it is a wonderful thing to have a dream come to life and even develop a life of its own.
So it’s like your own child?
Yeah. Also, you know, one time I had the privilege when I was a boy of taking care of a red tail hawk that had its wing shot. And that magic moment after I had nursed it back to health, and it was released, and it took back off into the wild, that was wonderful. And to see something like KoolMoves take off, that is wonderful.
When you were starting it and it was in its infant stages, were there ever months or weeks when you had doubts that would succeed. Did you ever have major obstacles to overcome?
No. Bob may have felt that way sometimes when he was working on particularly difficult technical issues… I will have to ask him. But I didn’t. And I think that we had a very sheltered and supportive environment in which to start our product. Macromedia, of course, created the Flash format. And Macromedia started off with a product called Director, which was the most important of the early multimedia products for people creating multimedia on the desktop. And it was very involved and complicated compared to Flash. Flash was originally a lighter product and it appealed to a wider and less technically oriented audience.
But the thing that happened is that in order to get the Flash format to take off, Macromedia had to make the format an open format. That was their strategy to get the different web browsers to fully incorporate it in there standard download, rather being stuck as an optional plug-in. If it was a proprietary format it wouldn’t have been so widespread. The acceptance would be very limited.
Do you remember when there were so many different plugins that you had to choose from? And if you made something you weren’t sure if you audience could see it or not because you don’t know if they have the plugin. You don’t know if you could coax them into getting the plugin. Well. In order to win that battle, Macromedia had a giant publicity effort, a lot of advertising, and they opened the format up. But it wasn’t so open that you could actually just write code and have it work with the Flash player. So there was a world-wide effort by third party companies, individuals, and groups, to make the inside workings of the Flash format completely plain. And that is what I mean by saying that we had a sheltered and protected environment in which to develop KoolMoves. There was such an effort worldwide to make this format well understood and available to all. So many people worked so hard and made their work available on the Internet, and that’s one reason why it was so easy for us to get started and there weren’t the kind of obstacles you were talking about, is because there was an army of people worldwide working on all the obstacles simultaneously and sharing their work. It was a tremendous help to us to be part of that worldwide effort instead of having to shoulder it all.
So you saw this worldwide collaborative effort and that went into your decision making –that this is something that you could utilize and grow with?
We had made a decision to do this work and we more and more than pleasantly surprised to see the unfolding of this effort and how collaborative it was.
So when did you decide to do the work?
I think it was 1999 that we really started getting down to serious development of KoolMoves. But Bob would be more familiar with that than me. There had been a tremendous amount of work on paper – designing the interface and everything.
So your company originally started as a website design company?
Yes. And before Bob took up this cause, I had already been working on it on paper for a long time. I felt that Fantavision was a fantastic program, but I felt that moving onto Windows and having access to so much more computer power than that DOS program had at its disposal, I felt that something could be made…and I watched Flash develop. When it first came out it was called Splash. And then it was called Future Splash which became Flash. I watched it through all of those developments and a lot of times I said, “Well, I think it can be better. I think it can be easier to use.” And I started thinking about not even using the Flash format and starting another from scratch. But once they got to a critical mass of acceptance it seemed better to work with what had already achieved. What a great decision that was. In the software business, it is important to catch the right wave.
Meanwhile, Bob and I had already been working as web designers for a while and we noticed that everybody and their brother was becoming a web designer, and that the market was getting very, very, competitive. I was trying to think of a better way to compete in that market and ended up more interested in creating a better tool.
It was clear that many of our previous clients would, enjoy designing their own flash movies and websites, if the right kind of product was available. And I knew many professional Web designers wanted easier more affordable access to Flash design. We just wanted to empower those people to be able to do what they envision.
So you started selling KoolMoves in 2000, but you had this in your heads for years before that?
Yes. It goes so far back. I worked at a company called Pacific Data Images (PDI) from 1984 to 1991. This company was the company that eventually made the film Shrek and that was after it had been bought by DreamWorks. That all happened after I left, but several of the people I worked with were key to the making of each of Shrek movie. When I was there, I worked on a program that was used primarily to create Vector art of logos and then this 2D vector art was turned into 3D extruded flying logos, and other kinds of 3D models, such as lip-syncing lips. So I had been around the world of 3D and 2D animation for a huge period of time before KoolMoves was born. Back in the Early days of PDI doing this kind of animation was a much more involved, because it involved using clusters of mini-computers and workstations for days of rendering. We had a whole research team at our disposal while we were doing things. And big name graphic designers came as our clients. It was a very sophisticated environment.
That was the beginning of my working with animation. But I thought about this stuff in college. Wireframe Vector graphics was a big thing then. Just to have anything drawn on the computer at all was an amazing thing back in those days. People did films of something academically justifiable, like 4 dimensional cubes rotating. These projects took a huge amount of time. Just for the computer to draw a single frame of the movie could take hours. So I guess I have quite a long interest in this area. It makes me really appreciate all the breakthroughs that have taken 3D animation to where it is today. So many people have earned their PhD by adding to the powerful and elegant concepts that are the basis for 3D animation. I have tried to bring some of this great legacy down into our program.
So you started out doing website design with Bob and it became too competitive and so you sat down and said, “Let’s do something else.”
Yes, it had become too competitive. When we first started, it was comfortable and it was working. But there were a lot of different types of customers. There were people that wanted something very quick and there were people that wanted something very elaborate and everything in between. It was difficult to approach all these different types of jobs and bid them properly. And there were a lot of people going into the business. As a result there was a bit of a shakedown in that field at that time.
So we just took at look at that and said, “Why don’t we get into the business of helping these people do what they want to do rather than actually competing.”
So how was your first year of sales in this? Did it take off immediately or was it a slow beginning.
It wasn’t like we discovered a money tree or something but we did all right. And one of the things about our company is that we have a very low overhead. So we were able to sell at a very low price. In fact, eventually we had to raise our price so people would actually take the product seriously. I think that is a common mistake of people going into business. They don’t understand how valuable the product they make actually for their potential customers. It took us a while to understand that we needed to make a more powerful program and charge more money for it. The first year the program was very, very inexpensive.
How inexpensive?
I think it was something like $20.
When did you get your rave reviews from places like PC Magazine?
I think it was midway through our second year. The PC Magazine write up was in early 2002.
Did you know it was coming or was it a surprise?
It was a surprise.
Did that translate into a lot of new business?
Yes it did, actually. It was a five star review which got us a lot of attention.
How do you see your company evolving into the future?
Well, there’s a tremendous amount of power in the new Action Script 3 that is being created by Adobe. That will of course, greatly effect people who are doing scripting. But other types of customers will love it too. For example, many new types of effects will become possible, not to mention that 3D in Flash now can run an order of magnitude faster. There are many open source packages for doing 3D graphics with the new AS3. One of them is called Papervision and is the most popular right now. It has impressive textured mapping capabilities, that allow for models to have intricate painted on details. I’ve seen people use that technology to write code for rather sophisticated game engines. One demo shows six of the main type of small spaceships from Star Wars flying, chasing through the stars after a Darth Vader type ship. Previously, with AS2, you could barely rotate one of those small ships, and the motion was jerky. And now you can fly six, seven, eight objects around smoothly, with textured mapping. And this can be done interactively rather than with pre-calculated frames.
Currently we have a small 3D capability that allows our customers to create 3D animated text effects. I’m looking forward to jazzing that up with this new 3D technology and adding many more capabilities.
Tell me how this fits into video. Video is becoming more and more important on the Internet.
Oh yes. Video is definitely on the rise on the web. No doubt, in the next year or so, the majority of sophisticated sites will provide video clips. And many web site visitors will feel disappointed if there is not some video waiting for them when they come a looking. Of course the Flash format allows video to be played in the FLV format. KoolMoves offers a variety of players that can play that format. These players are beautifully designed with many different types of interfaces and controls. They will allow you to provided your web visitors with both playable video and MP3 music files and provide them with play list information.
Another great thing about it is that there are many free programs that will allow you to convert video from your digital video camera into Flash video (FLV). We let those companies do what they do best. But once you get things into the Flash video format, we help you incorporate it into your website or into Flash movies and multimedia. Also, in KoolMoves, you can do all kinds of special processing on video, dynamically on the fly. It’s really coming together.
There is now a popular design style on the Web, called Web 2 Style. People are doing so many different types of things with it to take the web to a whole new level. You yourself told me that you are excited about dressing up your website and making tutorials. An extension to this direction, is letting your audience see video, and interactive learning environments. KoolMoves is just excellent for that. Its output is very compact. Very crisp and clean.
But I want to get back to what’s happening with KoolMoves in the future. The web is just taking off in all directions at once. And the big thing seems to be to share creatively with each other. And to do that in a way which is illustrated, animated, videoed and scored with music. All these different kind of things are coming together to make it easier for you to communicate your vision to others in a way that is clear, understandable and exciting.
On your forum, do people create Mastermind groups? People teaming up with each other, sharing their projects with each other?
Yes. We have a tremendous number of people who are extremely active and generous. We have an entire online collection of ready made KoolMoves projects, that are free for people to use as examples and build on. These are open source and they are available at KoolExchange.com. I can’t imagine a product having better customers than we do. Our customers just lavish us with so much generosity and enthusiasm for what we do. It’s the biggest blessing anybody could have in business, to have such great customers.
On your main product of KoolMoves, since it first became a product back in 2000, how many versions have you released?
Well, you know there are minor ones. We are up to version 6.1.2. And then we have betas that are more advanced than that. So six is the big number now. I think the next major release will offer AS3 capabilities.
And when to you anticipate that release?
You will have to talk to Bob. He’s the one doing most of the actual development on that. I think it will be within half a year, if not quite a bit sooner.
So sometime in 2008?
Yes.
And are you already talking to your customers about this on your forums?
A lot of our customers are very sophisticated and have many different type of programs and are already developing AS3 with other programs. There has been some talk about it and everybody is scoping it out. Both we and our customers have to stay current. The Internet is changing and evolving so fast. Everybody has to buckle down and learn the next new thing so they can do their best and most impressive work.
Is that the biggest challenge of you, keeping current?
Well, you know, it’s not just that. Getting back to entrepreneurial advice, early on a lot of people said the best thing we could do was to make a good niche product. They said, “KoolMoves is trying to be a jack of all trades. It’s not going to be able to do any one thing that well.” But we did our best to strike a balance between developing a comprehensive product without being over extended.
The thing that we found is that there is really a lot of cross connection between these different types of applications for KoolMoves. And so, for example, when we develop AS3, which we are working on now, it is going to enhance many different types of customer projects.
And so, I think there is a lot of leverage we get by having a tool that spans the spectrum of uses. You get a lot more bang for your buck when you buy KoolMoves because of that. And when R&D is done on our side, we get a lot more capabilities than if we just had a niche product. I think people are very capable and they have proven to us that they can handle KoolMoves and really appreciate it. They don’t have to be that technically sophisticated. They can be people who are more artistically oriented and shy away from the technical side. Or they can be people who absolutely love the technical side. We cover both well.
You asked about staying current. It’s not just about keeping up. It’s about finding how to keep our particular type of customer pleased. There are so many different types of choices in technology. So which ones are we going to follow up on? Which ones are popular with our type of customer? It’s a balancing act. We have to make sure that we are keeping up and that we are keeping up in a way that appeals to our customers. And we like to get new types of customers. But we also want to keep KoolMoves fairly simple to understand and use. That is our balancing act.
You, as in individual, would you describe yourself as more right brained than left brained?
Both, sides have their appeal. Sometimes I have focused more on one than the other. I like art as well as science. I tend to stay involved in the intellectual world quite a bit. However I’m also very drawn to martial arts and healing through movement with Hanna Somatic Education. Not to mention story telling and movie making. One of the beauties of animation is that it brings together so many different aspects of life.
Do you wake up sometimes in the middle of the night with a creative idea for KoolMoves and you can’t get back to sleep? And you call Bob on the phone and say, “Get a piece of paper.”
I do try to sleep. But many times, what you say occurs. I get excited about ideas. Especially when I was developing Koolmoves 3D capability.
Could you say more about that process?
One of the things I did on that project was unusual for Flash products. I developed curved shapes. Not just flat polygons or facets that you see in 3D. But surfaces that are actually curved. And I figured out how to do that efficiently, because I was hoping it would work in realtime. But at that point, I was working in Action Script 1, and its capabilities were not up to the task. I could do maybe one letter at a time. And it had to be a simple letter. (Laughter) But then Bob incorporated what I came up with into KoolMoves, in a way that did not require realtime capabilities. Instead, it now creates a bunch of precalculated frames. So instead of doing real time 3D, KoolMoves now calculates all the shapes involved before hand.
I know, you have had health challenges, what can you say about that?
Well, it is a big pain. I have fibromyalgia, which is like chronic fatigue syndrome, only it hurt and tires you out. It imposes many limits on what I can do. But I am very lucky to have some good ways of dealing with it like Hanna Somatic Education (www.somatics.com).
How then is it possible for you to be a partner in a business like yours, in such a competitive industry?
There are several helpful factors. The main one of course, is Bob. He really does do a lot, day after day, week after week. Next there is the awe-inspiring work of our collaborators. They have created many of the coolest parts of KoolMoves, such as our media players, slide show components, motion scripts, 3D animated text effects, a beautiful user’s manual, and our clip art collection. There is also, Richie, a silent member of our company, who gives us the benefit of his many years of experience as a software entrepreneur. Finally, as I have told you, there is the tremendous generosity of our customers, who have freely contributed many valuable assets to KoolMoves.
The people on the forum for example, volunteer to help each other with problems, and many lavish great care on our new customers that are just getting started. And they also keep us in the know about the myriad of new developments on and off the web. On our forum there are just so many talented and knowledgeable people involved. Their collaboration multiplies the power of their individual expertise many fold. What a tremendous resource we have in the KoolMoves forum people. They it keeps us going.
But these fabulous people must be inspired by you, don’t you think?
Basically, I think it is just in them. I personally keep pretty much behind the scenes. I do what I can, but it is on a small scale now. Mostly, I act as Bob’s man Friday, doing little things he is too busy to handle. But I also help him with the strategic planning for KoolMoves. And here and there, I contribute a little R&D work. I develop our logos. I work with others on developing our website, and various types of multimedia pieces to show the capabilities of KoolMoves. I also do some of the advertising. And because I use KoolMoves to do much of this work, I get invaluable hands-on experience using our tool in real production situations. That gives me some kind of perspective on what KoolMoves is really all about. I am just grateful to be a part of it.
So this collaboration with your customers is beyond your wildest dreams?
Yes, I would say so. I never realized how great and satisfying it would be. It’s just amazing.
Do other software companies have that type of customer loyalty in their forums?
I guess, I really wouldn’t know. I think that many, many companies have forums. Somehow, though, we attracted people who are truly exceptional.
What do you think the secret is, for someone starting a software company, to attract that type of customer base that gives so much of themselves to make the software better?
You have to be at the right place at the right time and capture the imagination of some of the brightest and most creative independent thinkers. I consider it is due to Grace. I couldn’t do it on purpose if I tried. But it did occur.
Anything else you care to share about your creative drive and inspiration?
You called it “Following your bliss.” And I certainly love animation! It’s been a pleasure to be in this field all these years. It’s very satisfying. I love the excitement of seeing each new development unfold.