I have been thinking of how to create application buttons for Kalzumeus in a pretty Web 2.0-ish style and, on the recommendation of several BoSers, bought Axialis Icon Workshop. To test it out, I decided to redo my sort of frumpy Buy Now! and Download Free Trial buttons for Bingo Card Creator, and see if the new versions aren’t any more successful. While you can of course see them at the best place to get bingo cards for teachers on the Internet, I’ve isolated the section of the interface so you won’t even have to click off this site:
The Old Buttons (Created in Paint.NET using an open source button as base)
The New Buttons (Created in Axialis Icon Workshop, using their Web 2.0 Objects Pack, with cropping and resizing in Paint.Net)
(Edit: GoDaddy seems to be undergoing maintenance or something. If you’re getting slow as heck performance grabbing those images, that is also affecting my website proper. Yay.)
One feature that I had in mind for the 1.1 release of Kalzumeus (does it even make sense to have a 1.1 version of a webapp? Well, you get the general drift) was the ability to send a real, honest-to-God postal mail in an automated fashion. It is a requirement with legal significance for some of my customers, and all of my customers would see the ability and go “Oooh, that would save me so much hassle”. I have been searching for a good way to do this for a while. Obviously, doing it myself would transform me from a highly-paid software developer to a low-paid postal clerk, which is frankly stupid when there are plenty of businesses out there which offer ways to do it without ever having to lick a stamp.
My post on Free Bingo Cards, which is two months old, received a hair under 1,000 hits in April (thats three days worth of weekday traffic for my website — not shabby!). This resulted in ~100 trials of my program and 5 sales, or roughly 20% of my sales for the month (full monthly stats to follow sometime this weekend). And the kicker? That post is an evergreen — it never goes bad. It continues to pick up search engine hits, links, emails to friends, yadda yadda, and keeps making me money.
