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Promoting Visual DialogScript
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FreezingFire
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 08, 2004 6:21 pm    Post subject: Promoting Visual DialogScript Reply with quote

I think VDS is something waiting to be discovered still. I had to search
long and hard for something like VDS. I finally found it after weeks of
searching. When I downloaded it, I told myself, "this is too good to be
true".

I'm sure others have had similar experiences. I wish more people would
be exposed to VDS.

I think that Commercial-Research should do some advertising for VDS.
Perhaps the best advertisement would be in PC Magazine, or PCWorld,
both very popular magazines worldwide for IT Professionals.

Another way to get new users of VDS would be to somehow have it
reviewed by one of the abovementioned magazines.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to suggest this to CR so they take
such an idea seriously, or any other sure-fire ways/ideas to get more
users of VDS?

BTW, I think there would be enough people here who know how to use
Adobe products to create an advertisement or something for a magazine.
I myself know quite a bit and have a friend who works for a large
newspaper in the layout department.

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Skit3000
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 08, 2004 6:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

About a week ago I E-mailled some Dutch computer magazines about VDS. I also gave them a link to a tutorial I made, in case they want to make a little review about VDS. Besides that, I'm now and then making some other small programs and/or tutorials, so that I can release them in case one of the magazines I wrote decide to publish about VDS (so that people can have a basic start)... Smile
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Garrett
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 09, 2004 12:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I don't know though.... I get worried that if VDS does become popular, we'll lose this nice little community we have now, and have had for years now. If it gets too big, it might lose that personal feeling it has. Well, at least from my own personal point of view, but for CR, I'm sure it'd be nice for them to have an explosion of VDS popularity.
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FreezingFire
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 09, 2004 12:46 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

That could be one concern, however, I think in order to push CR along to
do things that they still haven't done, such as send out the complimentary
package for VDS 5, given an SDK for DLL developers, fixed bugs, etc....

I think it would benefit VDS if they had more sales. Smile

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SnarlingSheep
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 09, 2004 2:45 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I think it would benefit VDS if it were owned by a company that took it seriously, meaning support and promote it. CR doesn't and most likely never will.. it's probably best to realize and accept that.
Pretty sad when the users feel obligated to support and promote a product they pay for, and actually end up doing so more than the people they pay for the product.

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FreezingFire
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 09, 2004 2:47 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I must agree totally.
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jules
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 09, 2004 8:55 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have to disagree with you, Garrett. If the size of the VDS community is indicated by the number of participants here, then there are simply not enough potential customers for a new version of VDS to pay for the cost of developing it.

I take the point about advertising; however, advertising in magazines is expensive. I don't know what the cost is now, but it was more than 3000 GBP for a page in one of the top UK computer magazines more than 10 years ago when I worked for one. Few shareware products make the kind of money to support such fees.

You have to bear in mind that when Emmanuel / SADE took over VDS from me, he did so because my personal circumstances at the time meant that I was unable to handle the workload of selling and supporting it. Although I had a couple of other approaches about taking it over, no others were from people with any kind of track record that suggested to me they were capable of dealing with it, or were able to pay a reasonable price for it. VDS would have died there and then if Emmanuel had not taken it over, despite the fact that at the time it was selling over 20 copies a month. It's easy to criticise, instead of to be thankful for what we already have.

If we want to point fingers and apportion blame for the failure to promote VDS, perhaps we should look closer to home. What about the abysmal Google page rank (1/10) of VDSWorld? Even my own site (tech-pro.net) manages a page rank of 5/10. If more people were able to discover this site, and see the resources available here, they would only be one click away from downloading a trial copy of VDS.

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Skit3000
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 09, 2004 10:34 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Julian, I remember reading somewhere that you wrote (reviews?) for a pc magazine. If you still do this, maybe you could write a review about VDS? Smile
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 09, 2004 10:40 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The way this works is that they (the magazine) commissions the writer to write a review. So first you have to get a magazine interested in publishing a review if VDS. Unsolicited reviews are likely to go straight in the waste bin.

Whenever I find an appropriate opportunity to mention VDS in something I'm writing, I do. But as far as most editors are concerned, VDS is just yet another bit of obscure shareware.

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Garrett
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 09, 2004 7:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Just to touch on a few things.... I'm not pointing any fingers on this. Just
kind of dropped my opinion in.

But! I have a few extra things to point out. Back when Jullian was selling
VDS, a group of us had gotten together to discuss forming a company
just to purchase VDS from Jullian. At the time, there were I think about
5 of us in on this. But, before we could do anything, the sale had already
happened. Sad

One thing I have noticed since then, is that user sites have dropped into
oblivion. There once was many VDS user sites, and they were active.
But now, almost all are gone or just sitting there collecting dust. Do you
know that you can still find the VDS ~Shack on Geocities?

The last thing I want to mention, is that SADE, like Jullian, is not a large
corporation. The abilities to get things out there just is not always as
possible as it is with large corporations. It's not a matter of blame on
something like this though. It's just a limitation. Jullian nor Emmanuel
individually can't do everything to get a product to it's potential. And
such a product is not capable of keeping a staff on hand all the time to
take care of support, marketing, research, development and such.

Many of us here have give our time to try and help out, and sometimes
even getting rewarded for our efforts, but even that is not enough to
really achieve what we are talking about here. It would take a team of
people working hard to reach this goal. Volunteers are great and
always appreciated, but they usually don't last long unless they start to
the results of their labor quickly.

Even I have run into the volunteer burn out. I still handle support email
for VDS, but I just got burned out on the live support, as well as the
others did who tried to keep it manned all the time.

Personally, I'm just not sure there's an answer to this problem. I do
think though, that a large coordinated group effort on this could do some
good for VDS. But it would take coordination and the ability of the people
involved to follow through with it, and to do this for possibly nothing in
return for the efforts, except the possibility of an increase in size of the
VDS user base and community. Basically, it would have to be a labor
of love. That, and it would need someone who's capable of keeping
those involved motivated.

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FreezingFire
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 09, 2004 10:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I would want to be more involved but it seems that it's really hard to get
in touch with the right people, as I rarely receive replies to my e-mail. Sad

jules wrote:
If we want to point fingers and apportion blame for the failure to promote VDS, perhaps we should look closer to home. What about the abysmal Google page rank (1/10) of VDSWorld? Even my own site (tech-pro.net) manages a page rank of 5/10. If more people were able to discover this site, and see the resources available here, they would only be one click away from downloading a trial copy of VDS.


There's no way to really advertise VDSWorld and have people interested
in visiting because this is only a community site for a fine product. Perhaps
if we had any funds we could do something, but VDSWorld is generously
hosted by PGWARE, and Tommy kindly takes care of the domain registration
issues. VDSWorld is run by volunteers and we make absolutely no money.
We also get about 300 - 400 sessions (unique visitors) per day. I don't
know what Google PageRank is talking about, since this is a fairly heavily
used site.

And I'm not pointing fingers either, but I think something needs to be done.
I hope VDS will be improving over the years, or something will need to
be done.

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jules
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PostPosted: Tue Aug 10, 2004 8:54 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

In reply to Garrett's post:

I agree in general. If I could turn back the clock I would not have sold VDS. No disrespect at all to Emmanuel, who has turned out to be a good friend, and helps me in several ways (like hosting my domains on his servers) but I could not have foreseen the way things would turn out for me personally. If I had retained VDS then in the last two or three years I have had a lot more time that I could have spent developing it. I could not have foreseen that at the time. At the time, I had to choose between VDS and my other work, and I chose my other work because I made much more money from it.

If I was developing VDS for myself, then to an extent it would be a labour of love, in that I don't expect every hour spent to yield a certain amount of income. But if I am developing it for someone else then it is a job, and I want to be paid a certain rate for it. The question is whether VDS makes enough money to pay for all the work that needs to be done to develop a really worthwhile new version, if the developer has to be paid a commercial rate for it.

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PostPosted: Tue Aug 10, 2004 9:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

In reply to FF's post:

Google's page rank is based on the importance of a site. The number of visitors has little to do with it, as there is no way for Google to count that. It is largely determined by the number of links pointing to the site.

I don't pretend to be an expert on search engine optimization, but here are a few facts about tech-pro.net that might be relevant to why it ranks much higher:

    - all the pages are pure html (built using a template and a VDS script when I make changes) which is probably more search engine friendly than php;
    - I have generated links in to the site by having articles on various technical topics that people can find using search engines: other sites have linked to them;
    - the programs on my site have been submitted to loads of different software archives, again creating links in to my site.


I haven't spent a penny in promoting my site, just time.

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PostPosted: Tue Aug 10, 2004 9:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Interesting thing I just found about determining the number of links in to a site, and their importance.

Go to http://www.alltheweb.com and type in link:www.vdsworld.com .

Now do the same at Google.

Google doesn't even show my own link to this site, although it does show some of my links to www.dialogscript.com, which are on other pages. It seems to ignore the link to here, because it is on a page full of links, or perhaps because my links page isn't considered important.

So it isn't enough just to have links in to a site, they have to be from a page that Google considers important.

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Serge
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PostPosted: Tue Aug 10, 2004 9:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

not to blow my own horn but in recent times i have learnt a great deal about search engine optimization and i would be happy to volunteer my services to make the homepage of www.dialogscript.com search engine friendly for the correct targetted keywords and this would drive traffic to it and hopefully sales

i have managed in the last few weeks to get my web site listed at google 5th for a specific keyword...the process is not hard if you know what to do

i have been in touch with emmanuel twice about submitting vds to shareware places via pad files and have not heard from him...it's a shame as that would increase his google ranking and it could drive more traffic to his web site Sad

serge

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