Creately Blog

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Startup stories from 3 corners of the world
URL: http://creately.com/blog
Updated: 1 day 3 hours ago

The Creately Customer Guarantee

Wed, 2010-03-10 00:40
At Cinergix we’re committed to providing the best online diagramming software with Creately.com. But we also know you expect more from us than just a great software application. That’s why we’re introducing our first customer charter. It’s our commitment to outstanding customer service and providing the best online diagramming experience - that’s the Creately experience.

It covers many of the things that will help make your Creately experience as enjoyable as possible, from how to access assistance 24/7 and what our privacy policies are, to how often we will fix bugs and update the Creately service.

What you can expect from us

Because we strongly believe that getting quality doesn’t mean having to compromise on excellent customer service.

  1. You can be confident about always receiving an email reply to your Creately support requests
  2. Our team will always be available via email 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to respond to your feedback
  3. We will always endeavour to make Creately easy to use
  4. We will strive to ensure you always have access to your Creately documents
  5. We commit to maintain the privacy of your personal information
  6. We will honour the Creately Plan you sign up for while you continue to pay the subscription fee
  7. We will always bring you new and innovative ideas around visual collaboration
  8. We will work to fix a bug in a timely manner
  9. You will always have access to the latest release version of Creately through our website
  10. We will always offer the most extensive set of online diagram templates and shapes.

Unfortunately, there are times for every startup when things don’t go to plan. If you are inconvenienced as a result, we think it’s important to know what you can expect from us, and that you know we will always be helpful, fair, open and consistent.

Enjoy Creately!

Signed

@Chandika
@Charanjit
@NickFoster
@Hiraash

Growing Traffic for your Web Startup

Wed, 2010-03-03 19:08

So you’ve built a killer web application (lets call it “Killer App A”) and you’re ready to take over the world with it. Now what?

How exactly do you get the rest of this planet excited or even aware of your new whizz-bang Killer App A? How do you get it out there and build an audience for your product with a bootstrapped startup’s budget?

Just like conventional offline marketing, every startup marketer needs to understand the basic marketing tenets of Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning if you’re to succeed. Once you’ve identified your target segment and customer - you’ll need to find the best way to reach these target customers.

Unfortunately, simply knowing who your target customer is - isn’t going to be good enough because you don’t have the budget to hire marketing suits to help you reach these customers. Fortunately for all of us, the Internet today offers a host of options to get Killer App A out to the people who matter - it just takes a little work and a healthy dose of creativity to succeed.

3 Questions to ask about your target Customers?

Once you’ve identified your target customer - you’ll need to know where to find your target customer, or more specifically, where on the Internet your potential customers are spending their time and attention - so you can get “Killer App A” in front of them.

Typically you need to be able to answer the following questions about your target customers:
1) Which websites or blogs does a typical customer visit?
2) Who are the influencers or mover and shakers that your target customers are paying attention to?
3) Are there online Communities, Forums or Social Networks that your customers congregate at?

Answering these basic questions will help you formulate the most cost effective strategy for customer acquisition - allowing you to channel your limited resources towards the most relevant customer sources.

Start Here… Google Alerts

The first thing I’d recommend for anyone trying to reach their customers is to create a set of Google Alerts. Google Alerts are a great way to keep up to date with the latest on any topic on the Internet, and thats exactly what you want to do for the keywords (topics) that matter to you and your customers. You can set it up to receive daily alerts and once you’ve found a site thats relevant - you’ll want to Engage, Engage, Engage.

Here at Creately.com - we’re interested in customers who draw technical and business diagrams - so we’ve set up Google Alerts which point us to sites, blogs and online conversations where these are being discussed.
Then we engage in the blogs and forums that discuss these topics - initially by offering to help and providing useful information and resources to gain credibility in the community. And finally introducing your product/service where appropriate (Note: Posting about your product without engagement can be counter-productive). This is a great way to reach out! Once you’re known within the community, you can also send out direct emails to bloggers requesting them to review your startup - this sure beats a standardized email from an unknown startup.

Where are your competitors reaching customers?
Another nifty trick is to set up Google Alerts for you competitor’s product or brand. If someone’s talking about your competitor on a website or blog - that probably means there’s a keen interest from the Blog’s author and readers in your particular space or product. As long as your product can add value to the discussion, there is no reason why you shouldn’t engage with this blog/site to put forward Killer App A.

Start-up Blogs

Another great source for potential customers is getting featured on one of the leading Technology blogs like TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb or Mashable. These sites can drive a lot of traffic to your website but simply relying on these tech blogs is not good enough to grow your startup’s web-presence (Read more about the Techcrunch bump here).

Here are some good tips to help you get featured.

Besides these high traffic blogs there are a host of very useful niche blogs that may be relevant to your target customer base. But, how will you find these niche blogs? Marshall Kirkpatrick (from RWW fame) has a good post on finding the right sites on his blog.

Directories (Google Loves them)

Now, just as how review sites are paramount to any startup it is equally important to get listed in Directories. DMOZ is one such prestigious directory, and so is MakeUseOf.com, and KillerStartups.com. Bookmark these URLs and read these posts for useful tips for getting Killer App A listed on them:

Good backlinks from these reputable Tech Blogs and Directories help build your business’s reach and gain credibility in a very competitive startup environment. Besides being a great way of acquiring initial traffic, these listings improve your site’s Google Page Rank by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to your pages.

Content is King

Reviews and listings will drive good traffic, but to convert the traffic into customers there’s a lot more work to be done - we’ll discuss some strategies for conversion in another post. In the meantime, you need to be constantly engaging with the communities that will drive customers your way. Write blog posts that appeal to your target customer, always using appropriate titles to capture the attention of readers. The goals of your blog posts should be to educate, inform and to generate comments.

Social Media is your Friend

You’ve written your posts and published them - now its time to make sure you get the maximum leverage from your effort. Social media plays a key role here, so make sure you have profiles on popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg and loads more. Submit your blog posts with a back link to your blog or site. Remember to make your interactions with members on social networks a 2-way dialogue by answering their questions and helping the community where possible.

And Yes, at Cinergix we do a lot of hardwork to create a buzz about Creately! We aim at having as many reviews, listings and social media presence as possible. These tips may not work all the time, but keep at it and I assure you it will pay off.

Here’s a simple diagram featuring Creately’s Reviews from 10 review sites.

We hope you’ve found this post useful for your own Killer App - we’d love to hear of other innovative things you do to get your product out to the world.

@Charan & @Indu

Image by: Intherough/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Fast Online Flowcharts Video Demo

Wed, 2010-02-24 01:03

Creately Video Tutorial #4 - Fast Flowcharts with Creately

Today, we show you how to create a fast and easy flowchart to share with your team and clients. In 3 mins flat, we’ll show you why our 1-click Create-N-Connect buttons, easy collaboration and built-in commenting features make Creately the best online flowchart software.


Creately Video Tutorial #4 - Fast Flowcharts with Creately

Ten Categories of Social Media - A Simple Framework

Thu, 2010-02-18 00:18

For any business, especially a web startup, having a sensible and comprehensive Social Media strategy is key to online success. To help you work out a comprehensive strategy, we’ve put together a simple framework with Creately that captures the basic aspects of the Social Media landscape that you’ll need to consider.

Social Media today goes well beyond social networking and blogging. It consists of  many categories, but here we have chosen to highlight 10 key aspects which should be your business’ focus as you start on your Social Media journey. I’ve included two tools for each category to help you put your social media strategy into action.

@Induja

New Project Management Web Design Templates

Sat, 2010-02-13 00:01

Hi, it’s been awhile since we added new Templates to Creately - well at least not in this New Year. So we thought we’d hand out some treats just in time for the Lunar New Year (it is the year of the Tiger after all).

Project Management Templates

First off - a couple of new business Templates to help you with your Project Management diagrams. Every Project Manager needs a good Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and Project Team Organizational chart - so @Induja put mouse to pad and created these templates to make your Project Management tasks a wee bit easier.

Work Breakdown Structure Template


Project Team Organizational Chart



Matrix Structure Template

We also know many of you today work in cross-functional teams with fairly complex reporting structures - so we’ve added a Matrix Structure Chart to help you and your managers visually capture the who’s who in your project teams.


Web Design Templates

Don’t worry we never forget our Developer and Designer fans either. This week - 3 new web design templates to help to deliver on your project milestone faster.

First off, a new webpage Wireframe Template that uses a wide range of UI elements to demonstrate the extensive shapes and UI elements we support in Creately (including a Video Player, Google Maps Widget and Breadcrumbs). Besides this, we’ve added 2 new templates to quickly create web Sitemaps and web page flows.

Webpage Wireframe Template


Website Page Flow Template


Web Sitemap Template


Check out how easy it is to work on website wireframes and mockups with Creately. As always, you’ll find these new templates right there in the “Create New Diagram” window in Creately - so login to check them out.

We hope you’ll benefit from these templates. If you’ve got suggestions for new Templates - just drop us a note or send us a tweet - We’re always listening.

@Charan

What’s going on @Creately

Mon, 2010-02-08 21:17

As Twitter becomes more popular and pervasive, it has become an essential tool for start-ups to engage with their customers. Here at Creately, we actively engage our users, supporters and even the occasional detractor on Twitter.

Recently, we wanted to understand what our customers say to us on Twitter so @Indu went through our Twitter archives and put together this simple connections map of our @Creately Twitter account to capture some of our more active users and what they’re been talking to us about.

Who’s Talking to Creately & What are they Saying.

As @Indu worked on the diagram, she decided to pull together some recent Tweets about Creately to share with the team and you - our customers.

  • b3nw: saved by a javascript app creately - http://creately.com after MS Visio just refused to link things, whew. Best $5 i’ve spent in along time.
  • UrbanHaiku: learning how to use creately.com to make a flowchart for my blog. I like it.
  • JasonStoddard: Highly recommend @creately & checking out their mindmapping/diagram solution. Hosted. Elegant. Stupid-simple. #FF
  • megormi: I made some interesting graphic organizers today using creately.com thanks to the suggestion by@socratech
  • nocash: Been looking for something like this for a while: Create and Collaborate on Online Diagrams - Creately -http://creately.com/
  • Rohlund: I highly recommend checking out creately.com if Microsoft Visio is not your friend. #ittools

Thank you for all your tweets. We try to respond to each and everyone of them - so if you’ve enjoyed using Creately - tell us - we’re always listening on Twitter.

If you’re not following Creately on Twitter - now’s the time.

Scheduled Downtime New Team Plans

Sat, 2010-01-23 19:09

Welcome back to Creately - we’ve got a brand new release on the way  and we’re very excited to give you a lil glimpse into our plans.

Scheduled Downtime

Before we can release the new plans we’ll be doing some internal housekeeping this weekend. Our Creately.com service will be shut down for 3 hours on Saturday Night (PST)/Sunday Early Morning (EST). This will allow us to set up the internal infrastructure to introduce these great new updates over the coming week.

Downtime Schedule

Australia - Sun 24 Jan 2010 5:00 - 8:00 PM
United Kingdom - Sun 24 Jan 2010 6:00 - 9:00 AM
US (EST) - Sun 24 Jan 2010 1:00 - 4:00 AM
US (PST) - Sat 23 Jan 2010 10:00 PM - 1:00 AM

Upcoming Features

Over the coming week, we will be announcing a new Team Plan - that will make it simpler for you to collaborate with your team and clients.

Along with the Plus and Pro plans, the new Team Plans will come with advanced user and administrator management, unlimited project sharing and billing management capabilities.

Also All users will get better project and diagram management features - including the ability to move diagrams between Projects, better support for PDF exports on Linux and a new Profile page to manage your account.

We’ll have more here next week - so subscribe to our RSS feed to keep up to date with Creately’s Visual Collaboration platform.

@charanjit

Image by - Leo Reynolds / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Critical Success Factors for a Web Startup

Wed, 2010-01-20 20:32

Last week, the entire Creately Team (except Graham - we missed you mate) gathered in our new office in Colombo for a week long strategy and planning session. We reflected on the past year, our successes and learnings, evaluated the market and primed ourselves for an exciting year ahead in 2010. We talked a bit and drew quite a lot during the week. We’re firm believers of visual thinking and communication and ended up capturing most of our thoughts and findings in mind-maps, concept diagrams and the like. Over the coming weeks, we’ll share some of these diagrams that we feel can help other young startups like ourselves do better in 2010.

Today, I’d like to share a Concept Map that Chandika put together - Critical Success Factors for a Web Startup. It captures key elements of a Startup’s operations that need the Entrepreneur’s attention and how these elements impact your success as a web startup. With so little time and so much to do - anything that helps keep an entrepreneur focused is very useful. So if you’re like me, you’ll want to print it out and pin it someplace you’ll see it everyday. Click image to enlarge What else do you think should go into the diagram? Did we miss something crucial that you’d like to add? @charan

10 Best Social Media Tools for Startups

Sat, 2010-01-16 17:46

Setting up your own web product company? Start following the founders of Creately on Twitter to see a mix of interesting and insightful tweets!! And, yeah one such tweet is what made me contribute today! I found an really useful blog post on Mashable - ‘10 of the Best Social Media Tools for Entrepreneurs‘. This was tweeted by Creately’s co-founder Charan. This post grabbed my attention cos I wasn’t aware of some of the tools listed here.

To help me remember, I thought it would be worth it all into a diagram that would capture the essence of each of these services visually. I created this diagram on Creately. With Creately’s slick Upload Image feature, I managed to pull through all the icons of the Social Media Tools in the list, added a short description and it was ready to be published.

So here’s a simple chart to help you remember 10 of the Best Social Media Tools for Entrepreneurs and Startups!

If you enjoyed this - remember to check out how easily you can create visual maps like this with Creately - Online Diagramming.

@induja

How much to charge for your Web App?

Sun, 2010-01-10 20:34

The great thing about working in an Internet start-up is the learning we get to do every single day of our lives. We don’t always know the right answers to every question we face, but the very nature of the Web lets us try out new ideas and quickly adapt them to achieve the best results for our online businesses.

The Big Kahuna Question

The Cinergix team faced this ‘hard’ question 3 months ago when we launched our online diagramming service, Creately, to the public. After being in beta for almost a year, where we spent a lot of time and effort in engineering, we were faced with the question of how much to charge for our service. Of course we had tons of ideas and projections in our business plan, but now that it was finally time to start generating an income, we weren’t exactly sure how much our customers should be paying for our collaborative diagramming application.

Our customers’ feedback and reviews told us we had a service that was loved and valued by users, but we struggled to quantify this value. Creately was being used in small businesses, software and design companies, startups as well as by students from all around the globe. We felt Creately would be valued differently by each group - depending on what they used it for.

A web design agency using Creately to work collaboratively on a Web Site project with their clients receives immediate economic value by shortening the turnaround time of designs and raising customer satistfaction. This would make Creately a valued tool - in essence allowing us to charge a “Premium” to this customer. But a student using Creately may not see such immediate economic returns, and hence would not be willing or able to pay the same price.

Faced with this dichotomy of users and our desire to ensure Creately remained accessible to everyone who needed it, we devised a simple Pricing Experiment that would help us better understand Creately’s perceived value to our customers.

The Experiment

We set up a new Creately Plus plan and decided we would let our customers choose how much they would pay for Creately each month. We called it the “Pay What You Want” offer and set about putting the plan into action.

We set up a simple Upgrade page (see screenshot below) with sample prices of similar diagramming applications, and launched it with a Press Release and a newsletter to all our beta users. The experiment would run for 2 weeks and we hoped to get a better sense of our customers and how much each of them valued Creately.

Marketing Sequeway

This also proved to be a bit of a marketing coup. I thought we had an interesting story with our PWYW plan, so instead of putting out a Press Release announcing the launch of Creately  - we pitched the unique “PWYW” pricing angle. This lead to stories on TechCrunch, TheInquirer.com and a host of other blogs. We didn’t realise this at the time, but not many people (besides Radiohead) have tried this before.

The Results

I would be lying if I said we were not pleasantly surprised by the initial results of our experiment. This along with the publicity we received convinced us to continue to run the pricing experiment for 2 months instead of the planned 2 weeks.

We received a wide range of offers from $1 (the minimum allowed) to $100, with the mean ranging between $4-$5 and a median of $3.

  • Customers who paid $1 were mostly new users who’d heard about the PWYW plan and signed up on the first day. This group of customers was also the most likely to cancel their accounts over a period of time. Many of them did not use the application intensively and would have been fine with a Free plan.
  • Customers who paid the Mean Price of $4-5, have made good use of their Creately accounts, including creating multiples diagrams and publishing them. These customers come from a diverse range of industries including small businesses owners, marketers, teachers and students. These users have shown less propensity to cancel their accounts as they were extracting good value from their accts.
  • Customers who paid more than the Mean Price provided the most valuable insights. These customers incorporated Creately into their work and business processes and derived significant value from Creately’s collaboration capabilities. Customers in this group included tech-savvy small businesses, software teams, design companies, Webmasters and business consultancies. This group made the most use of Creately to collaborate with co-workers and clients, valuing our visual collaboration platform to communicate and solve real business problems across cross-functional teams, instead of simply using Creately as a diagramming tool.

Another very interesting point that stood out from our experiment is the difficulties that so many of our users faced with completing their subscriptions with PayPal. The complaint emails as well as large percentage of abandoned transactions - forced us to work on alternate payment methods.

Lessons Learnt

Understand your users
We’ve learnt that its very important to understand who your customer is and why someone’s your customer. No two customers are the same so it’s important to learn what each type of customer gets out of your product. This is important if you want to stay relevant to your most valuable customers and helps you focus your marketing and development investment to maximise your returns.

Give Customers What they Need (or To each his Own)
We are even more committed to the idea that Creately delivers differing levels of value to our customer. We don’t want to forgo any customers and will need to continually work to ensure Creately is available where its needed.

Sustainable?
The PWYW scheme did a good job in helping us gather invaluable data on our customers, but may not be sustainable over a long run. This is due in part to the fact that although we ask people to be Fair, not everyone is. Also, for a startup with limited resources, it becomes very hard to do any real business planning & projections when you add variable pricing to the mix.

Action Plan

We’ve been working on a set of actionable activities that we worked out as a result of our experiment.

  • Make it easier for teams to work together on our visual collaboration platform, by introducing Team Projects.
  • Introduce Pro Plans that deliver greater value to customers who use Creately intensively.
  • Focus on developing a clear market position that resonates with our high value customers.
  • Put in place a new payment infrastructure to replace Paypal. This will be announced shortly.
  • Institute a Creately Scholarship programme to give access to charities, schools and colleges at deeply discounted prices.
Conclusion

We may not have fixed every concern we had, but this experiment has definitely helped us identify our strengths and understand the market response to Creately. Even though we gave out quite a few Creately Plus accounts for $1, we believe the data we collected over the 2 months has more than paid for itself in terms of lost revenue.

Tell us what you think of our findings. Would you have conducted this experiment in a different way? We’d love to hear from any online service that’s faced this question before.

@charanjit Some Good References on Pricing Strategies for Startups Image by: Marco Bellucci / CC BY 2.0 & Brandon Schauer/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Tales from the Creately Support Inbox

Thu, 2010-01-07 20:30

Firstly I’d like to say Happy New Year from the Inbox!

Creately is really pushing technical boundaries to bring collaborative diagramming to the masses. But while its all very exciting building new features and functionality, its good to remember who we are doing it for. You guys! Our customers. So the way we handle our customer service must be as good, if not better, than the service we offer.

Great Support is part of the Creately Experience

Quick and efficient support is one of the key offerings of our product. But we don’t just see customer support as a necessity, or just another offering. Engaging with our customer enables us to unearth a wealth of fantastic ideas from our user community, to help us push Creately forward, helping us develop it with our customers’ needs at the forefront of our product plans.

Whether you are on the Pro, Plus or Public plans, when you send us an email, submit feedback at the end of a session, give us a heads up about a bug, send us a message on Facebook or enter a suggestion on the forum, we always read and respond to it with our 24 hour support. This seems to surprise one or two of you as you think your comments fall on deaf ears. No way! Your comments provide a lot of benefit to us and we encourage you to send us as much information as you have time to. You love to get chatting to us about what you do or don’t like about Creately, with positive comments or giving us ideas for improvements - and we love every bit of it.

To start this year off we are working on improving our approach to customer service so we continue to give you the best possible support for your inquiries. As the number of customers grows, so does the amount of support requests, suggestions and general inquiries, and we don’t want to let a single one of you down with a poor response! We will soon be implementing internal service level agreements (SLA’s) to ensure our paying customers receive priority attention, but that our non-paying customers, on the Public plan, will still always receive a quick response, particularly on critical issues. This is being done so that, while we keep growing as a company, we keep customer service friendly, efficient and helpful with clearly defined expectations and targets which will allow us to measure and improve our performance over time.

Talk to Us Anyway you like

As a first step to achieving our customer service goals we have logged all the places that ideas and feedback come from that influence Creately’s development. Given the importance we place on Social Media, and the number of different channels of communication available, we want to make sure we (as a company) are aware of all the different places where you engage with us. In other words, are we listening to our customers effectively and in the right places?

We will continue to post customer service developments on this blog, and feel free to let us know what we are doing right and how we can improve. Don’t forget, we love chatting to you guys, so keep the feedback rolling in!

Graham

Image by:Grant Neufeld / CC BY-NC 2.0

Celebrating NYE around the World!

Tue, 2009-12-29 20:30

We’re about to step into the New Year and the whole world is waiting to celebrate the New Year’s Eve with loads of elation. And I’m here sitting on the couch sipping on my cup of tea, trying to draw a Concept Map.

New Year’s Eve is just like a monsoon that sweeps away all the negative experiences and helps us start afresh. Old Year’s Night will be celebrated on December 31, 2009, throughout the World with parties, social gatherings and firecrackers -  to cherish the beautiful moments of the year. The year that will soon be just a memory in one’s life!!

Yes, it’s New Year’s Eve in a few days and you must want to know what’s happening around the World. Check out our Concept Map. We’ve put together a simple diagram to capture how NYE is celebrated around the world and whats the most happening location for this New Year.

Creating this map was easy with Creately’s 1- Click Connectors. You can draw Flowcharts, Business Diagrams, Infographics, Organization Charts, UML Diagrams, Sitemaps and a whole lot more. Now try Creately and mark it as your New Year’s resolution to communicate visually when-ever and where-ever you can.

@induja

Why Sitemaps and Website Navigation Plans Matter

Tue, 2009-12-29 04:53

Working with designers, developers, clients and other stakeholders in designing a website can be a challenge, especially when working with external vendors. Its challenging enough to grok your client’s exact requirements and you want to make sure these requirements are clearly understood by the entire project team. As part of a web design project, its essential to develop a sitemap or website navigation plan in order to clearly communicate the intent and scope of your website to stakeholders and the project team.

Web site navigation plans should include all the web pages within your site and preferably be easy to navigate, update and share. But an ideal navigation plan, should allow you to easily link your sitemap to your webpage mockups - so clients can visualize and explore the entire website design even before a single line of HTML code is written.

Interactive Sitemaps with Creately

This 2-min video demonstrates how to create interactive Sitemaps and Website Navigation Plans with Creately that user’s can click-thru to review the underlying webpage mockups. With ready made easy-start templates and a fully interactive interface, Creately makes it easy to create and collaborate on sitemaps, mockups and wireframes for all your design projects.

Like what you see? Sign up for Creately - and start creating website plans and online mockups for free.

@charanjit

The importance of Graphic Organizers in K-12 Classrooms

Thu, 2009-12-17 14:42

Ever heard of people go on and on about Graphic Organizers? Ever wondered the importance of them?

As the name implies, graphic organizers are visual learning tools which facilitate the students’ ability to learn and understand better. However, the effectiveness of these graphic organizers depend on the involvement of the teachers and their responsibilities in explaining to students how to use such tools. Graphic organizers are suitable for students in all age groups; it helps them organize complex information into concise visual maps. Is that all? No, they have a great potential for fostering learning in a variety of different areas in education, particularly comprehension, reading and vocabulary skills.

We, at Creately studied the importance of these graphic organizers, and designed a number of easy to use graphic organizer templates. After doing extensive research on the popularity of specific graphic organizers, we designed templates for Storyboards, Fishbone Diagrams, T Charts, Y Charts, Cycle Diagrams, Venn Diagrams, ISP (Information, Source, Page) Charts, Persuasion Maps, KWL (Know- Wonder- Learn) Charts, and much more.

You can see a few of our worked examples and template samples below -

  • StoryBoards - Storyboarding is a great technique for discussing books and literature. With Creately’s StoryBoard Graphic Organizer Templates, you get a web-based visual organizer which helps students work together on writing to better understand the story. It’s great for discussing story structures and exploring the varied ways in which the author works with time.

  • KWL Chart - A KWL Chart or ‘Know-Wonder-Learn’ chart is an excellent visual graphic organize. Creately is loaded with great KWL chart templates that you can put to use immediately in your classroom. With Creately, your students can work in groups on a KWL chart online then share with you to submit their work as an assignment.

  • SWOT Analysis - SWOT Analysis is a tool for auditing an organization and its environment. You can now brainstorm on SWOT analysis with your students using our online SWOT Analysis templates and organizers. From the classroom to the boardroom, a SWOT graphic organizer is a useful tool and can be lots of fun with Creately.

  • Persuasion Map - This is a very effective tool which helps students map out their arguments for a persuasive debate or essay. In Creately the Persuasion Map templates are completely customizable and accessible online anytime.

  • Cluster/ World Web - In Cluster/ World Web templates, the students are expected to write the topic in discussion in the centre circle and the details in the smaller circles. Now you can work on the fine Cluster/ World Web templates in Creately.

  • ISP Chart - ISP Chart is also known as the ‘Information- Sources- Page’ Chart. These chart templates in Creately would come in handy for students who are trying to compile the list of references for any project/ assignment/ thesis they are working on.

Having seen the neat examples, I believe you are convinced with Creately’s Graphic Organizers. Now all you have to do is, sign up for free and experience the customizable templates online.

Making the Creately Experience Better

Fri, 2009-12-11 22:18

What a glorious month its been… We received fantastic news just a couple of days ago that Creately (and Cinergix) have been named in the Top 50 Coolest Company awards by Anthill Magazine, then we moved into our brand spanking new offices in Sri Lanka and now we have a Creately release packed with features you’ve been asking for.

New Release Highlights

This week’s release is focused on making your experience with Creately a whole lot better. We’ve now made it possible to use your own local machine fonts in all diagrams, made significant performance improvements, fixed many UML bugs as well as introduced new templates for project managers and business users.

All the Fonts you can Eat

A few months ago, we added 10 open-source fonts to Creately to let you create professional looking diagrams. But guess what? Once our users tasted the forbidden fruit, everyone was clamoring for more. So as our legal team (read Founders) tried to figure out a way to get around the copyright issues of embedding fonts in Creately, the Dev team came up with a beautiful solution.

Why not let users load and use their local machine fonts in their diagrams! Hmm… sounds great but what happens when someone uses a font in a shared diagram that another user does not have installed on their computer? That’s where font notifications and substitution come in. We’ve devised a method of notifying users when there’s a missing font in a diagram and automatically providing a substitute font.

We think this is a excellent solution that will make many of you very happy! Try your hand at a diagram with fancy fonts and let us know what you think.

UI Performance Improvements

Unresponsive software sucks. Nobody wants to use software that freezes up or slows down. So here at Creately, we’ve kept a close eye on the performance of the application to make sure it exceeds your expectations. Lately though, as our customers have started working on very large and complex diagrams, some users have reported a degradation in UI performance. We decided we’ll have none of that and neither will our customers, so the team set about analyzing the issues and have made significant improvements to the codebase to improve the ‘feel’ of the User Interface. We’re not through yet, but are pleased with the improvements we’ve made this week.

Here’s a short list of what you can expect:

  • Selecting Multiple Objects and Select All (Ctrl-A) is much faster making Copy-and-Paste much smoother.
  • Significantly less lag when moving Container Objects or other objects into Containers.
  • Faster cursor and mouse response as we’ve optimized all the redraws that happen when you move your mouse cursor over the drawing canvas.
  • No more waiting to download fonts (which can be upto 2MB in size) cos we’ll automatically load the fonts installed on your computer.
  • Watch this space, we’ll be doing more performance related improved over the coming weeks. Let us know, if there’s anything else troubling you.
Resizable Drawing Canvas - ‘Cos you asked for it

We’ve gone from a fixed canvas size, to a customizable size in the last 3 months. But you said that wasn’t enough - You wanted to be able to change the size of the Canvas as your diagram grew - making this the 2nd most requested feature on our Community Support Site.

So we’re gone and done it. Now you can click on the Page Properties tab (click on the Canvas, then open the Properties Tab on the right-side) to change the size of your diagram page anytime. Simple.

Better UML designs with Creately

We’ve had a renewed focus on the UML modeling and design space. We’ve found that our users love Creately for UML. This week, we revisited all our UML shapes and have fixed many little issues in the UML KObject shape sets for Class, Object, Collaboration and Deployment diagrams. More info on these UML fixes can be found in this blog post.

New Business Templates

We are always adding new Templates to Creately. This week, you’ll find new templates for Work Breakdown Structures, Ansoff Matrix, Value Stream Maps and more.

@charanjit

Easy UML diagrams with Creately

Wed, 2009-12-09 20:12

We’ve had support for UML designs and diagrams for a while here at Creately. And we’ve found that many of our users really like collaborating on UML designs with their Teams through Creately. With built-in commenting, easy embeds for your project wiki and PDF exports, Creately is perfectly suited for almost all types of software and design documentation.

Little Niggly Issues

Unfortunately, there were a few issues and limitations with our UML support. Little niggly things that were marring your experience with Creately. So we’re spent the last forth-night going through all the reported issues with a fine tooth comb to make Creately for UML an easy to use and perfectly functional UML modelling software. This is just the beginning. Expect a whole lot more from Creately for UML in the coming weeks.

What have we Improved?

Without going into too much detail, I’ll list out some of the fixes we’re included in this release of Creately UML.

  1. Resizing UML shapes - Previously, when you resize a UML shape like a Class or Package, the new size is not correctly saved, resulting in diagrams getting a little messy when they are re-opened later. This fix was particularly challenging for UML objects, as they support Filtering data properties in the diagram - making them dynamic shapes that resized as you added more Attributes and Members. Issue Fixed.
  2. Copy & Pasting a UML shape resulted in the copied shape being resized to its default size. This has been fixed, so the next time you make a copy of any UML object, you’ll get an exact copy. Issue Fixed.
  3. Limit on the size of the Attributes and Operations you can enter into a Class and Object Shape. We’ve removed this now, so you can model large classes with no problems. Issue Fixed.
  4. Adding more attributes and operations to UML shapes, didn’t always automatically resize the shapes, resulting in a muddled image. Now all UML objects will automatically resize to fit all visible data properties. Issue Fixed.

  5. When working with Filters on UML shapes, turning on the attributes or properties in a small shape would cause the text to spill out of the shape. Now all shapes automatically re-size to accommodate filtered text. Issue Fixed.

We’re working very hard to make Creately an ideal solution for all you software and design teams out there. So watch this space as we introduce new features and fixes that will make your team’s life a whole lot easier when it comes to working on UML designs, Mockups, Wireframes and Sitemaps.

@charanjit

10 Google Wave invites from Creately

Mon, 2009-11-30 17:32

Here at Creately we’re passionate about providing great customer support. Graham, your favourite support guy, and the rest of the team work round the clock to ensure you have the best possible experience with our service.

As a follow up to our previous post on using Google Wave to deliver a new support experience, we are now happy to give away 10 invites to Google Wave, so you can try it out for yourself.

We just have 10 Wave invites to give away for the time being - so get on this immediately. We are definitely looking forward to inviting and supporting many more users as Google Wave grows.

So if you’re a Creately user, post a comment here or send us a mail if you’d like one. Once we send you a Google Wave invite, all you have to do is to add us to your contact list - creately@googlewave.com.

Unscheduled Downtime - We’re now good to go.

Thu, 2009-11-19 18:30

We have just had some unscheduled downtime with the Creately service due to a database change not going as intended. The issue started at 5pm GMT and was resolved at approximately 11pm GMT.

The change was tested in our development and testing environment and even with the best change management it seems things still go wrong. The issue affected a change to the main diagram database structure that was required to facilitate our recent introduction of Team Projects to Creately.

Sorry for the inconvenience caused and rest assured that we have found the root cause of the problem. We have put steps in place to ensure this doesn’t happen again in the future. We will also be introducing extra redundancy to ensure that next time the switch over to the backup database is even quicker.

Creately is now back to normal, but if you face any issues, please do let us know.

Happy Diagramming and thanks for your support.

@nick_foster