RatCat Software » Website Development

Working on the webside of the business

Ted Moroz — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 23:59:56 +0000

You may have noticed, then again, you may not have, but I have been working on updating the look and feel of the RatCat Website. Some of the changes (and the most obvious) is that the home page is no longer the blog page. I did this in an effort to place the most important information up front. Looking at it from this point of view: The front page of the web site is kind of like the front display window of a storefront. It’s the 1st thing the majority of people see and it makes the first impression.

The blog, on the other hand is more like spending a couple of minutes talking with the store manager. You find out what’s going on, but you may also go into an information overload and find out way more then you need to or care to know about the store. That brings me to why I changed the front window view, I want to ensure that the potential customer finds what they are looking for right up front, with the least amount of effort possible. The blog on the other hand, will be just a menu click (or bookmark) away for those of you who want to know the stores manager!

Couple of other items to note… We finished up the Meghan’s Math Quiz during the middle of the week and it is now under review with Apple. If all goes well, it should publish to the store on or about the middle of the month (I’m shooting for the 15th of August). Anther thing is that we have been working with a very talented local artist Michelle Vz over at Ginpu.us to create a real logo for our company. The logo should be finished up in the next week or so. Also we made a few visual enhancements to our Preschool, Kindergarten and 1st Grade editions of Meghan’s Memory Game. At this point, sales have been so low on the 2nd and 3rd Grade editions it may be time to lay them to rest. Finally we have seen some good results from advertising in both Facebook and Google. Combined sales of our products are up 126% over last month!

Updated our subscription options

Ted Moroz — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:31:23 +0000

This morning I added Feedburner to our blog. This service from Google allows us to provide RSS and Email subscriptions of our updates. This way, if my sister wants to read the blog via her Google reader, she’s covered, and if my Mom wants to see whats up, she can subscribe to the email notifications and be notified when a new blog entry has been posted. Wordpress by default offers RSS feeds however Feedburner takes it to a whole new level. If you want to read more information about Feedburner it is available here on Feedburners site. Like the Google Analytics installed yesterday, Feedburner was very easy to setup and add to the site. You start by creating an account (which authenticates with a gmail account), adding your current feed url and shazam Feedburner creates a new url for you to begin using on your site immediately.

To make the feeds easy to sign up for I also added a Wordpress plug-in called “Subscription Options” from a site called Digital Cortex.
This plug-in creates three buttons that link to each of the available feed options, RSS, Email and Twitter.

Attempting to learn more about our sites visitors

Ted Moroz — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:29:03 +0000

Not sure why I didn’t know this right from the start, but it hit me like a bolt of lightening today… We need to understand who is viewing our web site and why. From what I can tell Google Analytics can help us learn more about where our visitors come from and what they do when they get here. This information will help drive future decisions on what we do with the blog, our product pages, and our youtube postings.
The process of setting up google was very simple and straight forward. You sign up for an account, they assign you a bit of java code to add to the head section of your html and your off and running. RatCat Software is using WordPress to maintain our site, so I first attempted to add this via a plug-in, which too is a very simple and easy to do. Well, it didn’t work as expected and although I only installed one plug-in (there are several to try), I quickly gave up and just added the code directly into the custom.php. Once the code snippet was in place, Google was able to recognize the page and our sites status changed to indicate that the tracking code has been detected on the home page of our website, and Google Analytics is aggregating the data to populate into your reports. So, starting today, we are hooked into the google analytic system and tomorrow we can begin to improve our online presence and strengthen our marketing efforts.

Started a RatCat blog

Ted Moroz — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 14:48:40 +0000

Now that we have the company formed, its a good time to start blogging about the development of our idea. So, to get started we signed up with Siteground for web hosting and installed the Wordpress application. Our initial template design is “Gears” however as time permits we will work to modify this to suit more of the look and feel we are trying to achieve with RatCat.