Vesess

It’s been a long, difficult year for everyone, but freelancers and small businesses in particular have borne the brunt of the recession. Economic instability means less work and less work means less pay, and less pay means, well, less money to spend on growth. Yet, as we’ve said before, we firmly believe that if there is a group that can make it out of this downturn and do it in style it’s SMEs freelancers.

As a SME ourselves, we’re well aware that price is a big issue when putting together our workspaces. However, we also strongly believe that for small companies to work well they need to have the best tools for the job. In fact, with that in mind, we’ve been working on something that we’re now finally ready to reveal!

With the year drawing to a close and CurdBee doing great, we’re excited to be able to give our loyal userbase a little something for the holidays. That’s right, after a good run in 2009 thanks to your constant feedback and encouragement, CurdBee is here and handing out the good stuff in the form of Bundles, a unique new promotion from your favourite online invoicing service.

Cool, right? While you’re at it though, be sure to look inside. This isn’t just $25/mo value for $10. This is the chance to get online invoicing forever for just a fraction of what you’d usually pay. While a PRO account usually costs $5/mo, now you get a chance to get everything we have to offer for just double that, a figure that will remain unchanged through future price revisions. As your invoicing needs grow, and we develop more modules, you can of course continue to add to your CurdBee package. The features you purchase with this Bundle however, will always be priced at $10/mo, no matter how long you stay with us.

If you’re think about expansion and growth, and want to be sure that your invoicing package grows with you, now’s the time to plan ahead and get the features you know you will need in the months to come. So think about it, but don’t think too much – there are only 200 hundred of these offers available and if our initial research is anything to go by, they’ll be going like hotcakes.

It’s the end of the year, and as you plan for the next, remember that despite the economy, we’re all going to grow together. So plot, plan, and consider a Bundle. It may be just what your small business needs right now!

UPDATE: This offer is no longer available. If you like to get notified on similar offers in future, please subscribe to CurdBee Newsletter

Finally CurdBee is ready to accept more Pro users and allow existing bee lovers to add more modules. We know you’ve been waiting for this since we launched our new website with several upgrades early this month.

We wrote our billing system from scratch, since we wanted more flexibility with yearly billing option, PayPal payments and especially to allow easy billing capabilities for more great ideas we have in our white boards for CurdBee users in the time to come. However the implementations are never easy as on paper and we had to take little more time to tweak some of the processes and do the account migration from our old system.

So now you can start upgrading your accounts to Pro, add modules and view billing history.

Sorry, due to an unprecedented issue occurred during the migration to new server we had to temporarily disable “Upgrade & Extend” & “Payments & Billing” sections in CurdBee. During this period you will not be able to upgrade or downgrade your CurdBee version (Pro & Standard) or enable/disable add-on modules.

We are working hard on restoring these features and will keep you updated on the progress here. Hopefully we should be able to restore these features within next couple of days (2nd week of November 2009).

A Brand New Look

It all started a few months back when we conducted our first set of in-depth analyses on the CurdBee website. Since going live last May to mark the launch of CurdBee Pro Edition, we got some excellent feedback from our users and also got featured on a number of prominent design/CSS galleries.

A few weeks passed, and as we tracked our visitors we noticed that the site’s bounce rates were pretty high (averaging 41%) and that our primary goal conversion (new visitor to free account sign up) was averaging at 4.2%. Our single page website (V1) was doing much better than this in terms of conversions and the bounce rate there was significantly lower as well.

With a revamp, sometimes it takes a couple of weeks for things to settle down and show some regular patterns. Yet, this was not the case with CurdBee V2, and we thus went back to the drawing board to think of possible solutions.

Conducting a few tests and interviewing some users during the next few weeks, where we were able to capture some interesting thoughts,

“I don’t know whether it’s only me, but I like your previous site. It was simple and clean. ”

“The site looks nice, but the header and footer are bit too dark, more white could have been nicer.”

Now that information was really valuable to us. We needed a little more proof before deciding what we would do though, and for hard data we turned to Crazy Egg, for some heatmap analysis.

After running these tests for a while in two separate instances, we were able to spot some of the main issues affecting the numbers.

1. Sign up, Upgrade and Extend are not links, yet visitors click them more often. Why? Do they look like links?
2. Visitors haven’t paid much attention to the screenshots in the highlights section. Didn’t they realize they are clickable and that they can view the full image?
3. The main call to action via the “Sign-up Now” button at the bottom of the features list hasn’t had much clicks on it either. Wasn’t it visible enough, especially since it was placed towards bottom of the page where users would have had to scroll down?

The problems were clear enough and we started looking for solutions. The result? CurdBee V3!

Is that all? Nope. We have more upgrades and updates, many of which have been requested again and again by our users.

Pay CurdBee with Amex and PayPal

To date we were only able to accept payments with Master and Visa credit cards,  and we’ve been getting a lot of requests asking the same questions over and over again – Do you accept PayPal?, Can I pay with Amex?.

So, we thought hey, why not make life easier for CurdBee users? As of today, both these options are now available. As far as I know, CurdBee is one of the few online billing apps to accept PayPal and we are hopeful to see a 14% increase in sales – at least, that’s what PayPal advertises on their website.

New Billing System with Yearly Payments

Yes, you heard it right. We have enabled a Yearly Subscription option for those who would like to pay upfront and enjoy a year’s worth of billing without needing to think about monthly payments. Also, with the yearly subscription, you will be only paying for 10 months (saving 17%), whether you go for the Pro Edition or for module upgrades. Check our pricing page for more details on this.

Processing payments on a daily basis and then seeing which ones go through, which cards fail, and then notifying users – that’s quite a lot of work and we need at least couple of hours to monitor all that on a daily basis.

“What if we make our billing date to 01^st of every month?” I asked Laskshan. We were analysing all the pros and cons and noticed that making CurdBee bill on a single day could be more beneficial in the long run, and that’s what we’ll be doing from now on.

Improved Support Section

At Vesess, we’ve always been passionate about providing our users with good support. With the launch of this new CurdBee site however, we’re taking our help desk experience to a whole new level. The main changes that our users will notice to the support section of CurdBee are the inclusion of a discussion forum and the introduction of a searchable knowledgebase.

The Discussions portion of the Support Section will allow users to create and reply to conversation threads. From problems to bugs and feature requests, this is where you want to end up if you want to connect with the CurdBee team as well as fellow users. We hope that the discussions space will grow quickly to become a place where CurdBee users can come to find quick, reliable help, and we’ll be doing everything in our power to make sure that this space remains productive for all involved.

Next, our new Articles section will function as an archive of tips, tricks and guides related to CurdBee. As a somewhat extensive Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page, this part of the Support Section will be particularly useful for new users, since we plan on documenting all of CurdBee’s basic functions here using an easy to navigate format.

New Demo Feature – Touch and feel the difference

Finally, and this is one of the updates we’re most excited about, you can now try CurdBee PRO for free, with all features enabled. While we hope this will encourage more of you to upgrade to PRO, you can try the full version and then go back to using the Standard Edition if you feel it’s sufficient for you.

So, why did we decide to add this feature? Going through our access logs in the run up to releasing this version of the site, we saw that a lot of users tended to make two accounts with us. First, they would create a test account to try it out and then create a legitimate one to use on a daily basis. We thought that allowing them to try PRO would limit the need for this, and that’s exactly what we implemented.

While screenshots and videos are nice, we want you to really experience the power of CurdBee PRO before you decide for or against it. We’re confident that in most cases, our full version will benefit you in more than one way and that you will definitely decide to keep using it. Don’t take our word for it though, go ahead and see for yourself.

These updates have taken a while, but we’re pretty happy with the end result. We hope you enjoy them too, and that you’ll continue to use CurdBee and introduce/recommend CurdBee to your colleagues, customers and friends who are looking for a simple and efficient online invoicing solution. While you check out these updates though, we’re off to the drawing board again to begin planning the Bee’s next iteration. As always, if you’ve got questions, comments and criticism, we’d love to hear from you, so do drop us a line. Thank you for your continued support, and we look forward to deliver the best billing experience in the months and years to come!

PS. If you’d like to see CurdBee previous home pages, here they are.

CurdBee PRO users have had the option of exporting invoices as PDF files for some time now. However, the initial implementation of this feature was pretty barebone and had several formatting issues. So last week, we took the time to do a revamp of our PDF machinery. The result? Kinda awesome, even if we do say so ourselves.

Our new PDF generation process is powered by WKHTMLTOPDF, which is a shell utility tool based on the webkit rendering engine and qt. It can seamlessly convert any HTML page to PDF while preserving all CSS styling and formatting, and well, that’s exactly what we wanted. The integration of this tool in to our Rails app was a cinch thanks to this plugin called WickedPDF.

We also redesigned the app’s Printer-friendly view to align with the new PDF view, and as some of you requested, now both the PDF and Printer-friendly versions of each invoice will show your custom logo.

Here is a sample PDF generated through CurdBee. If you’d also like to send easy and awesome PDF invoices like this, consider upgrading to CurdBee PRO today!

Here are the slides of the talk I gave at the Sri Lankan Ruby user group’s meetup.

(It was picked by Slideshare editorial team as a featured presentation on 1st October 2009)

Despite the global recession, it seems one economy was doing really well over the last year. But quite interesting fact is, that economy doesn’t come under the radar of Word Bank, IMF or ADB, those who keep their eyes open all the time. Know where it happened? At Second Life.

Believe it or not, the virtual economy of Second Life, a popular online computer game that lets users create a new reality for themselves, doubled in size last year. Users spent more than a billion dollars on virtual goods over the last year, compared to $360 million for the year before. Second Life’s economy is now larger than the economies of nations such as East Timor, Samoa and Dijibouti.

Read the full post here

Remember the old age (not far behind… just few years ago) where you had to type a whole bunch of codes just to add a new row to your HTML table ? I’ve almost forgotten that era with the convenience added through some of these libraries.

The Javascript Libraries That Shape The New Web

Bad news for web designers and developers.

According to the most recent data from California-based Web metrics company Net Applications, 27.2% of all Internet users are still running IE6, making it the most popular version of IE. By comparison, IE7 accounted for 23.1% of all browsers in action last month, while the newest edition, IE8, had a usage share of 12.5%.

Friends don’t let friends use IE6

Google released the Google Checkout store gadget which will be a easy to use add-on to small business owners. It allows you to use Google Checkout and Google Docs to to create your own online store in a matter of minutes.

To install the gadget on your site or blog, Google outlines just three easy steps,

1. Sign up for a Google Checkout seller account.
   Checkout will process your orders and help you attract new leads, convert more sales, and enjoy advanced fraud protection.
2. List the products you want to sell in a Google Docs spreadsheet.
   You’ll just need to create a copy of our template spreadsheet, and then replace the sample inventory with your own.
3. Place the Google Checkout store gadget on your website.
   You can embed your online store anywhere you’d like — on Google Sites, Blogger, or your personal website.

Start selling online with the Google Checkout store gadget