Website Review and Suggestions

**crickeys** · 12-24-2006, 09:30 PM

Hi all,

I've just finished a beta release of a piece of software I'm working on. It is designed to help simplify the organization and planning of various projects. It works for web design, software management, or any other type of planning.

I use it for the creation of my other websites. In fact, I used it to create itself.

http://www.simplicify.com

Please give me your feedback. Good and Bad.

**ADAM Web Design** · 12-24-2006, 09:43 PM

3 hours to bake a cake, eh? I'm a rotten baker, but even I'm not THAT bad.

Seriously, I'm not sure I get what this is supposed to be or do. From your writeup (and the line "I used it to create itself"), I thought it was yet another piece of content management software already filling up the buyer's flea market that is the CMS landscape.

Clearly, having watched the tutorial, it's not. But I'm left wondering: what the hell is it supposed to be, and why is it of benefit to me? All I can gather is that it's some form of planner that generates a PDF and remembers past plans to try and suggest future plans and courses of action. It simply doesn't sell.

It LOOKS nice, in a simple sort of way. But your marketing message is rather vague. You gotta whack people over the head with your marketing message, beat it into them, make sure they clearly understand, and then repeat the process 10 times because some people STILL won't get it the first time.

The site itself, as I said, looks pretty nice. I'm not sure if you want to use a butterfly for your logo, given that other organization from Washington State that does the same thing. I can't remember the name of it though...it's pretty small. Some would even say it's..."micro".

You just need to explain your concept better, that's all.

Also, on the one video tutorial (the first one), the form fields overlapped the playback bar on the bottom. Looked kinda weird.

**crickeys** · 12-24-2006, 09:54 PM

Thanks for the advice. I will have to strengthen the marketing message.

However, could you try using the site and let me know if you get a better understanding of it after using it. You can delete your account afterwards.

Thanks!

**ADAM Web Design** · 12-25-2006, 12:49 AM

Okay, I used it and after some struggle, I generated a proposal.

There are a few things that come to mind:

1) I found it somewhat awkward, particularly the PDF generation step. It took me about 4 or 5 clicks to get it to generate properly.

2) A progress bar in the top right would be helpful so that I know what step I'm on and what I'll have left to do.

3) I added two subtasks to a task, then indicated the task was completed without indicating the subtasks were completed. It told me that the job was 20% completed, when it should have said 33% or even 50% (since Task 1 was 1 of 3 and there were 2 subtasks.)

4) There's no way to indicate what portion of the total work the task is meant to be assigned. Not all tasks are created equal.

5) When I went to add subtasks, I was getting the list of tasks again. I shouldn't get that for subtasks.

This just seems awkward and excessively simplistic to me, and it's also a very small subset of what Microsoft offers in their CRM software. (Not that I like the software very much personally...I'm just letting you know that your competition is way further down the road than you are.)