Creately Blog
How to decide on using a 3rd party component
When you are building a software solution to solve a particular problem, you would be very focused on solving the problem and solving it well. However, from time to time you need supporting components in your solution that are not directly related to the problem you are solving. These are components that are required to complete your solution.
Maybe its a payment system for your online greeting card service, or a spell checker component for your realtime note editor, you would rather look for something that’s already built and working well rather than building it yourself from scratch. This way you can focus on your “core competency”.
This is generally how everyone thinks. So did we. Here at Creately, we chose to use a third party solution to complete a product that we were working on. In the rush and excitement of getting the product out we signed up with the 3rd party service not considering some important factors that we should have. Even though the intention was to avoid reinventing the wheel and save time and effort, the out come was us spending double the time and effort to get the solution to work. Lesson learnt the hard way.
So I thought I would put together a simple flowchart to help us evaluate such situations in the future when such a need arises again. This flow chart explains the basic thinking, and the factors involved in making the decision can be found below.
Picking the most suitable solution- How well is my requirement met? Does the solution meet all the feature and functionality requirements I have? Does the solution meet the integration requirements I have?
- Is the component build for me? Even if the solution meets all my functionality and feature requirements, one thing I have to watch out for is, if it does more than what I need. Will it complicate my product? or my users experience? or my integration process?
- Is the integration and setup process straight forward? Time and effort required to setup and integrate?
- What is the financial commitment?
- Considering all factors above, compare the time, effort and cost involved in building the ideal solution against using the selected solution.
- Can I use the existing features in the solution to make it do what I want it to do?
- Can the solution be customized to fit my requirements?
- What is the time and effort involved in customizing the solution for my need?
- What is the financial cost involved in customizing the solution for my need?
- Considering all factors above in A and B, compare the time, effort and cost involved in building the ideal solution against using the selected solution.
Is your online Sales Funnel leaking?
We normally use funnel diagrams to understand the flow of a user through our website, to the application, and then onto the purchase pages (or not). Some great tools are out there and just last week @Indu blogged about using Funnels & Goals in Google Analytics to better understand your funnel and conversion rates.
This week, we went and applied the same to our traffic funnel in three steps.
- Identify how our potential customers find out about Creately. The ‘trigger’ to visit the site.
- What their motivations are. Why are they here?
- Identify the pages they land on, and craft a message that resonates with the visitor’s intent and motivations. This will achieve lower bounce rates and far better conversions in a funnel.
Ok, again: Being relevant is key. but how do we know what’s relevant unless we know what you want?
Map it out!It’s easier to map this out in a diagram, and here’s ours - How People Discover Creately. Some of the bounce rates are guesstimates though.
We first identified the source for them to come to Creately, then we break them down by their motivations and where they would go on the site to what landing pages.
The next phase is to make sure the landing pages speak to them well and address their questions. That’s another post for another day
Before I go back to more diagramming and numbers, do you find this approach useful? How do you look at your traffic funnel?
Image By: vrogy / CC3.0Google Analytics for Small Businesses [Series 2]
Finally time for the next post in this series. I know its been two months since the first one, and sorry for taking this long! Better late than never, and here we go! If you’ve missed the first one on Visitors Map Overlay, stop right here, and go read it.
We’ve mentioned the importance of Map Overlay in the first post, and this time its all about Goals in Google Analytics! Lets see what Goals are, why they’re important and how we set them.
What are Goals in Google Analytics?Goals describe the completion of a desired task that you’d like your visitors to do!
By setting up Goals in Google Analytics, you can measure how often the desired tasks are completed, and this is called the conversion rate.
Before implementing Goals, identify what your website’s objectives are, and what visitor actions they correspond to. A goal can be anything from completing a contact form for generating leads to completing a purchase for driving revenue.
For example, in Creately, one of the Goals is a visitor signing up for our online diagramming service.
There are multiple ways to define goals, and here’s a great article written by Ian Spencer that gives more tips on Goals in Google Analytics.
And now, the Goal Funnel?Accomplishing a Goal involves a sequence of steps. The sequence that leads up to the completion of a Goal make up the Goal Funnel. For each Goal, you will need to setup a Goal Funnel and like the Goal itself, each of these steps must correspond to a measurable action on a specific page.
For example, Creately visitors go through a sequence of steps before finally performing the desired Sign Up action. Assume that you land on the Creately UML Landing page (the first step towards the Goal), where you might choose to Try Creately Now without signing up, and then from the Creately application you could opt to Sign Up ‘cos you’re convinced.
This would direct you to the Plans & Pricing page, where you’d be expected to choose a preferred plan, then click on Sign Up to make the purchase. Once you complete the purchase, you’d be sent to the Thank you page (this marks the Goal). Now, this means the desired task is performed and the Goal is accomplished.
However, on the other hand if the website visitor only goes up to the plans page, and opts to leave without signing up. Then the Goal is not met and it’s considered to be abandoned! Thus, Goals and Conversion rates are important to measure the performance of a website.
We refer to the whole sequential process as a funnel - many people start at the top and fewer end up coming out to the bottom by accomplishing the Goal.
Check out the flowchart below to see the steps that correspond to a measurable action on different pages -
How to Set up GoalsSetting a goal is very simple. If you have administrative access, you can sign in to your Google Analytics. Then go to Analytics Settings and select a profile, click on edit, choose an unused goal ’slot’, and click on edit again.
You’ll need to then follow the steps and decide what your goal is and how you’ll be declaring a goal, then click to finish and you’ll start measuring the performance for your website.
Check out this video for more details on Setting Up Goals in Google Analytics
Better Diagram Manager and More
This week’s release at a glance!
1) Better Diagram ManagerMulti-Select and new Keyboard Shortcuts
We’ve made it possible for you to multi-select all the diagrams in your Creately Projects. You can now select multiple diagrams to either open or delete them, saving you loads of time while working in Creately. To make it easier, we’ve introduced a couple of useful keyboard shortcuts - To select all the diagrams in a project, simply click Ctrl + A or hit click F2 to rename a diagram/document from the Document Manager window.
Check out the new Sort and Filter options!
Do you spend a whole lot of your time locating the diagrams in your Creately Projects? Click on the drop down menu on the Sort and Filter options to locate your diagrams in your Projects. With the improved filter options you can locate your diagrams in just minutes.
And don’t miss out on the new Detailed List view!
The Document manager now also comes with a new Detailed List view along with the standard Tile view of your Creately diagrams. The Detailed view displays thumbnails along with all the relevant details of all your project diagrams.
2) The Diagram EditorRe-sizable canvas to suit all your diagramming needs!
Click on the Page Properties tab, and check out the new Landscape page sizes which are now available!
Larger canvas for bigger diagrams!
We’ve been getting many requests to increase the maximum canvas size beyond 2500px. In this release we’ve worked hard to improve this and now you can create diagrams of up to 8000px per side. Great for those complex flowcharts and class diagrams. 3) Pretty shapes and connectors!
All your abstract shapes come with a default fill! We’ve decided to lose the plain boring white fills in our abstract shapes, and now they’re all with pretty gradient fills. We’ve not stopped with there, we’ve also tuned the Flowchart object connection points for beautiful looking flowcharts; and created thinner outlines on all the User Interface objects to give it a more uniform look.
We’ve introduced a faster JPEG encoder to make exporting JPEG significantly faster, along with better error management and recovery on Network and Session issues all to keep our valuable users happy!
Effective Sitemaps for your Web Projects
At Creately we are all about increasing project efficiencies with Visual aids. We help other companies be more effective using visual tools, and now we are kicking off a series to share some insights.
Over the next few weeks we will be looking at how we use Sitemaps, User Flows, Use Cases, User Stories, Wireframes and more in delivering an effective website / software product to a client. It’s a lot to cover, and do let us know if you have more ideas at blogs@creately.com
SitemapsWhen kicking off a project its always important to settle on a content structure for the site. While some argue the sitemap is a dated artifact now as content linking happens in many ways, we believe it is really useful when used right.
It’s a great tool to help visualize how the site is broken up, what the main pages are going to be, and where in the content hierarchy they belong. We definitely think its an important tool to use in a project to bring more clarity and consensus.
When to use1. Creating a new site:
Use it to identify broad content areas, sub sections and a conceptual structure for the site.
2. Updating an existing site / redesign -
Go through the site and generate a map. We recommend against typical ’sitemap generators’ as they pick out all links to create the structure. Not all links are made equal!
By documenting what’s in the site now, you can start curating the content
Guiding principles1. The site map is a organization and a planning tool. It is usually not the final outcome of the site. Use it not only to identify main areas of the site, but also page types, templates that go with them, secure/ non-secure pages etc.
2. Quickly agree on the first version of the site map and keep revisiting through out the project. Use it as a top-level view to identify what has been completed on the project, what high level decisions were made etc.
Best Practices for Sitemaps
1. Brainstorm first. The best way to do a sitemap is actually NOT to start with a sitemap. Try working on a mindmap with your client and the team. It will be a natural structure for you to capture all the ideas, then start grouping them together.
2. Identify the main content areas and their page breakdowns.
Content headlines, subsection headings should be recorded by this time. A good idea would be to record them right in the document itself.
The earlier you get this done, the clearer your clients and teams understanding of the project.
3. Mark out pages that include special functionality.
Got some pages that need to be loaded securely? some with forms? some featuring video content? mark them out in the sitemap itself.
4. Identify design variations.
Some pages in the site / app may have different theme’s or design elements. Color them differently to identify groups of these pages easily.
5. Keep it ‘Alive’
Review and revisit the site map as your understanding of the project changes. New pages, changed structure, new names; doing the simple updates to keep the document up-to date will ensure that you’ll have less confusion in your team and happier clients.
6. A High level view
Use the site map as a high level view to the project. You can link the user flows, wireframes and other documents you create on to the pages to keep track of progress and to provide a unified view to your client and team.
So how do you use Sitemaps in your projects?
How we Converted our Online App into a Plugin
Here at Cinergix, we are committed to delivering Creately to all of you who have the burning need to put that great idea into a nice picture. Over time we have heard and felt the love from everyone who’s been using Creately. Our desire to reach out to you gave birth to the idea of a Creately Plugin - an architecture that would allow us to integrate Creately to different platforms so you can continue to use Creately right within the platforms you work in every single day. And Creately for FogBugz is just the first in many more to come.
The ApproachTaking the current version of Creately that was built as a SAAS service and turning it into a portable component that works on any platform was quite a lot of fun and somewhat challenging. When we designed the Creately Plugin we had to make sure it could be easily reused and quickly integrated into any platform out there. This way Creately can be made available on your favorite wikis, blogs, case management and productivity tools in the near future with minimal rework.
Creately SWF & WrapperBasically, there are two parts to converting an online application like Creately to support a plugin infrastrusture. The first is the the actual application, Creately, that can be compiled in 2 different modes. The Online SWF Mode for SAAS delivery and the Plugin SWF Mode for integrating into plugin platforms.
The second component, the Plugin Wrapper, is responsible for integrating the application into the platform that hosts the plugin. This Plugin Wrapper needs to be built specifically for the platform that it is hosted on, using the platform’s API’s. Platforms like FogBugz have detailed documentation on how a plugin can be built for it. In the case of FogBugz, we also had the folks at FogCreek helping us get the best diagramming plugin out to you guys. Thanks, we couldn’t have done it without you guys.
Deconstructing the ApplicationSo we started with the most important component, the Creately SWF, the flex code that runs in the Flash Player in your browser. We worked in a layer of separation to enable us to compile the Creately SWF to run in different modes. Based on the mode, the Creately front end functionality and the backend interaction would work completely differently. The mode is specified in a configuration file that is used when compiling Creately.
The Online Mode SWF uses Remote Objects to connect and interact with the Creately backend services (Jupiter Service). The Plugin Mode SWF would expect a set of http endpoints to be available for it to communicate, to send and receive the required data. The Plugin Wrapper would expose these endpoints required by the Plugin Mode SWF and are configured in the configuration file.
This way by simply switching the configuration file and compiling, the Creately swf can be used to either generate Creately to run as a SaaS service or as a FogBugz plugin or a plugin for a completely new platform. This method not only enables us to easily build Creately plugins for more platforms but also lets us deliver all the cool new features we build into Creately to all distributions of Creately. Its great to be able to do this without ever splitting our code base.
More Ideas!You think thats cool? Well then you are going to like what I have to say next. This very approach will enable us to build a desktop version of Creately for you in the future. How about that?
Tell us what you think and how much you like the idea of Creately on your desktop. Also, if there’s another platform out there you’d love to see Creately on drop leave us a note here.
Header Image by Jake Mates / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0We’re excited about Flash 10.1
Last week the Flash Player team at Adobe released version 10.1. While its a small dot version number change, it is a monumental release in terms of its content and significance to what is happening in the browser market today.
Faster CreatelyWe’re very excited about the new version. With Flash 10.1, Creately now runs blazingly fast on the Mac (and on PC’s), is overall delivers a more stable and reliable experience. Adobe has thankfully fixed a number of issues that have plagued our loyal customers since the last version, including issues with image uploading on the Mac.
To achieve this performance improvements, Flash 10.1 supports hardware acceleration of 2D and 3D graphics, manages memory more efficiently especially in tabbed browsing situations and includes a number of core improvements to the run-time to reduce execution time.
Another very exciting new feature for us at Creately is Flash Player’s new Multi-Touch support API’s. The team can’t wait to have a go at this in the near future! The Future of Flash
This release of the Flash Player comes at a time when there has been much hostility against Flash. In light of the the Apple vs. Adobe debate, we feel this release put Adobe in a good place to start answering its critics. We hope they will continue aggressively improving its product capabilities rather than investing in meaningless ad campaigns in an attempt to reclaim Flash’s position as a powerful cross-browser platform.
Of course, the elephant in the room when discussing Flash is HTML5. For us as application developers, the competition between the technologies is great news. And no, they won’t kill each other off, it’s complimentary.
Historically, Flash has enabled us to push the envelope on what’s been possible in the browser well before the browser delivered. Now thankfully, with the focus on HTML5 and the browser wars of the 21st century back in full force, we are loving the amount of standards adoptions, evolution, and aggressive development that is helping the browser itself become a very powerful run-time to build on.
For Creately this means there are more things we’ll be able to do, to deliver awesome user experiences to our customers. It does not matter whether it’s delivered in Flash or HTML - the user only care that the experience is seamless, secure and productive.
We believe many companies including Adobe, Google, Mozilla, Microsoft (yes) get this. Only a few geeks care whats under the hood. End users only care that their job gets done. I’m surprised our friends at Cupertino who build ‘magical’ devices don’t get it.
And now, Diagrams for your Fogbugz platform
Today, we’re happy to announce the release of Creately for FogBugz, a brand new plugin for everyone’s favourite software project management and bug-tracking system, FogBugz from FogCreek Software.
Creately for FogBugz lets everyone on your project team communicate clearly by easily creating and including diagrams in FogBugz. With full integration into the FogBugz interface, you can easily add Use Cases, Wireframes, Flowcharts, UML or any other diagrams to FogBugz cases and wiki pages.
Squash’Em BugsBugs fixing will go a lot smoother when you can clearly explain the issues to developers. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so get everyone on the same page by adding annotated wireframes, or updated Use Cases to every FogBugz case. Anyone working on the case can edit and and modify diagrams as the case or feature is worked on.
Up-to-date DocumentationThe ability to quickly add diagrams directly within Wiki pages will make documenting your software projects a lot less of a chore. No more attaching external Visio files, and no more expensive desktop-based software. With Creately for FogBugz, the whole team can update project documentation right within the browser, saving time and more importantly helping keep your specifications up-to-date.
Get it now!Creately for FogBugz plugin is available for installation on your own Fogbugz server starting from $85/user with bulk discounts available for larger teams. Currently we only support Fogbugz on the Windows platform, but a Linux and hosted version for FogBugz OnDemand will be announced shortly.
Give yourself the advantage of Creately for Fogbugz by purchasing your license right now or if your not quite ready you can also download the free 14-day trial.
Local Diagram Backup and New Bulk Pricing
Today, we’re excited to announce Creately’s improved Import/Export capability made possible with our new Creately Document Markup Language (.cdml) and brand new Team Plans with great discounts for larger Teams. Lets jump straight into it.
Save your Diagrams LocallyFirst off, the new Import/Export capability. Team and Pro users can now backup all your Creately diagrams locally on your desktop by simply exporting a Creately Document Markup Language format file (*.cdml). These exported files can easily be imported back into Creately maintaining all embedded images and links at full-resolution.
We’ve significantly upgraded our upload and download infrastructure, so now you’ll be able to download CDML, PDF, PNG and JPEGs as well as import your own graphics into Creately at a blistering speed. This is great for all those mockups and presentations that need custom graphics. We know you’ll love this.
We’re most excited about the possibilities the new CDML format will present for our users and developers, so over the next few weeks , Hiraash will be putting up some ideas and examples of what you can do with our new diagram document format. Go ahead, export an image and open the CDML file with any text editor for a sneak peek.
Bulk User Plans!After we announced our Team plans and Creately for Google Apps, we’ve been inunadated with requests from larger Teams looking to adopt Creately in their pursuit for more efficient project collaboration. We’ve heard you and we’re happy to announce fantastic bulk discounts for larger Teams.
With the new prices, you’ll pay $8/month each for the first 5 users. If you have a larger team of say 12 users, you’ll simply pay $8 for the first 5 users, then $6 for the next 5 and finally $5 for the last 2 users. So a 12 user team will be charged $80 / month ($40 + $30 + $10). That’s a 17% savings, straight off the bat.
Check out our plans page for more details. If you need more than a 100 users on Creately - call us we’re here to help.
These new discounts will make adopting Creately across your Google Apps domain excellent value for money. As always, we’ve got great discounts for Educators, Colleges and do-gooders - just reach out to us.
What to ExpectOver the coming weeks - expect some exciting new announcements that will Creately the best visual collaboration and diagramming application for software, design and support teams, including a new plugin for FogBugz and improvements in our software diagramming capability. Until then happy diagramming.
@Creately Team
Top 5 Tools for Distributed Project Teams
Here at Cinergix we’ve been working together from different office locations around the world to create, market and support the best online diagramming software - Creately. We spend hours sitting in front of our computers each day working across vast distances and timezones and it can sometimes be a challenge getting everyone on the team working together effectively.
So over the last year, we’ve experimented with a large number of online services to help us work better and support our customers in the best possible way. In each solution we looked for just the right amount of functionality to help us work better without drowning in too much process and too many systems.
Here we’ve distilled the top 5 tools (mostly online tools) that we’ve come to rely on to keep the Creately engine chugging along nicely. They cover everything from project management tools to customer support systems, but each one offers the ease of use and simplicity that we find so important in keeping our team focused on the job at hand.
Thanks to @Hiraash for his suggestions and I hope you’ll find these tools useful for your project teams. If you’ve got any other suggestions that you think will be useful for other web startups and project teams, we’d love to hear from you.
Wrike is a web-based project management tool, and the great thing about it is that it comes with a fantastic Gantt chart view that knocks the pants off any other web based PM tool. @Chandika is a big fan cos he loves the fact that the Gantt chart view gives everyone a good idea of the inter dependencies across the projects we work on here at Creately. Unlike most other recent web-base PM tools that have a strong social collaboration angle, Wrike offers a solid PM tool in the same vein as MS Project, but its pricing is a tad on the high side.
TeamViewer is an easy to use screen-sharing application that’s Free and works really well. I’ve tried sharing my screen with Skype and other web-services but none have performed as well as TeamViewer. Everyone I’ve recommended it to loves it. And it doesn’t just stop there. Teamviewer lets remotely control another computer - even through firewalls. This is an essential tool we use everyday at Creately. Thanks to @Aslam for bringing this to the team.
For the uninitiated, Creately is a web-based diagramming software that comes with built in tools for easy, secure collaboration. With an extensive library of shapes, Creately supports many diagram types. Naturally we use Creately in-house - mostly for concept diagrams, flowcharts and mockups. Its great for getting those ideas nailed down quickly in a diagram - and really helps bring clarity to the team.
PS - We released a beta version of a Creately Plugin for the Fogbugz platform this week, which makes it easy to add any type of diagram to your Fogbugz cases and Wiki to clearly explain requirements to your team. You can check it out here.
Zendesk provides a customer support portal solution includes email support with a built-in knowledge base. We chose it for it elegant interface and the ease with which we can track support support issues and deliver the type of customer service our customers talk about. It also worked great for providing 24/7 round the clock support that is being handled across 2 locations. There are a host of other customer support systems out there that actually deliver more functionality at a lower price, but we’re sold on their “Love your Helpdesk” theme.
Pivotal Tracker is a story-based project planning tool that the Dev Team here at Creately swears by. It is based on the Agile software development methodology and support sprints, velocity, etc but can also be used for other types of projects. If you’re a fan of Agile development - then you’ll love PT, as we affectionately call it.
Best part about PT - Its completely Free (as in beer).
What do you use in your teams? Have you tried any of these tools, and have you found them effective in your business?
Image by mr.smashy / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0Google Analytics for Small Businesses [Series]
Today, I’m writing the first post in a series that will guide small business owners and entrepreneurs in understanding the important customer data that Google Analytics provides. We’ll look at where to find the data in Google Analytics and how this information can be useful to your business.
Google Analytics is a great tool for analyzing the traffic that shows up on your website. This will give you fantastic insights into who is coming to your web site, all the other related pages, and how they’re getting there. It displays so much useful information, and with just a little training, you too will be able to use Google Analytics for your business. We won’t go into the details of how to setup Google Analytics for your site - but here’s a great article on Mahalo that shows you how to set it up for free.
Today, we’ll start with the Visitors Map overlay. With the Visitor Map, you get a World Map graphic that captures website Visitor numbers by region, country and state. The Map Overlay can be accessed by clicking on the Visitors tab, and then the Map Overlay underneath it. You can also select different Detail Levels of the world map in City view, Country/Territory view and so on.
The Map Overlay displays Visits as the metric in the default view with the countries rendered in varying shades of green. Countries with the darkest shade of green indicates the greatest number of visitors in terms of website traffic. While some other countries have no shading at all, this indicates the site has never had a visitor.
The metric displayed on the map can be changed from Visits to Pages/Visit, avg. Time on Site, % New Visits, Bounce Rate, and Goal Conversion Rate. You can also drill down to see more detailed information within specific regions, either by clicking on individual countries on the map or selecting a different Detail Level. Look at the image below for an example of an Overlay Visitor Map drilled down to the Country/Territory detail of Brazil.
Are you wondering how Google knows which country a visitor comes from? Well, the answer is no rocket science, Google simply looks at the IP address of every visitor to determine from country/place in the world they are coming from. In the map of Brazil above, it tells us that Sao Paulo is the largest market in Brazil, followed by Rio de Janiero.
More interestingly, an Advanced Segmentation feature is now available in Google Analytics. This enables you to analyze subsets of your traffic. You can either choose from the pre-defined segments such as “Paid Traffic”, “Visits with Conversions”, “Referral Traffic” or create your own custom segments and then compare up to four segments develop a great understanding of your customer’s behaviour on the site.
With the Advanced Segmentation features you can also create new segments with the Segment Creator. Simply drag and drop dimensions and metrics into the boxes to create a visit segment. Then, you can apply one or more of these segments to data, and compare the segment performance. By setting up an advanced segment for just “Sign-up from Sao Paulo” for instance, you could drill down and analyse the behaviour of the users who signed-up from Sao Paulo.
Check out this video for more details on how the Advanced Segmentation works.
The geodata collected through Analytics helps to identify lucrative geographic markets and identify new locations for potential marketing campaigns. Targeting specific users geographically will undoubtedly increase the success of your business. I hope you’ve learnt the importance of the Map Overlay and how it can help you reach customers from around the world.
Creately on Google Enterprise Blog
It’s been three happening weeks for us here at Creately! Ever wondered why? Yes, the addition of Creately to the Google Apps Marketplace. Creately has been doing really well with it and has helped many businesses around the world to improve their visual communication and collaboration. This has caught Google’s eye and yesterday we were mentioned on the Official Google Enterprise Blog.
This post highlighted the five best apps added to the Google Apps Marketplace that are helping small business owners run better businesses. Read what Google’s got to say here<.
We’d love to hear from all of you using Creately on Google Apps how we can make Google Apps Integration work better for you. If you haven’t still added Creately to your Google Apps account, add it now with a few simple steps. Here’s a short video on how to install Google Apps on your account.
And when you’ve started using Creately in your Google Apps setup, don’t forget to leave us a review on the Google Apps Marketplace.
@charanjit20 Social Media Sites for Business Success
Businesses both large and small are fighting to get involved in social media, the craze is spreading like wildfire. But just how much do you know about it? Social media is a new phenomenon known by many names - geeks call it web 2.0, marketers call it social marketing, and yet others may call it social communication. Social media is a broad term, the best way to understand it is by narrowing it down. Hopefully this post will help businesses to understand the concept of social media and the best social media sites for your business. Delicious, Digg, Facebook and Wikipedia are just some examples, but today there are literally hundreds of other social media sites that your business can leverage to improve your website traffic. Today we’ll share some of the services we’ve come to rely on and see how each one of these have helped us increase traffic and engagement with with our customers.
Social News SitesSocial News Sites are great for finding useful resources, articles, and information on the web. We submit our blog posts and any other news relating to Creately to many news sites. Digg, Yahoo Buzz, Reddit and Propeller are a few of the best news sites which bring in the highest number of visitors. These sites offer the ability to actively participate in the discussion by leaving comments on popular news items. Once you submit links, you can vote up people’s submissions, as well as vote down stories that you don’t like. Interacting and connecting with people with similar interests cannot be any easier!
Social Bookmarking SitesSocial Bookmarking sites allow users to save their favorite sites with tags/keywords to manage and organize them easily for later use. Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon are always the highest referring sites at creately.com. We save our blog posts, landing pages and other relevant articles. Bookmarking sites not only allow you to save and share your favorite websites, but you can also look at what other people have found interesting enough to tag. Thanks to Charan, I’ve gained immensely through Charan’s Del.icio.us bookmarks. Just type in any web or marketing keyword and I bet you’ll find loads of interesting and useful resources!
Social Networking SiteSocial Networking sites have become increasingly popular these days. Twitter is a great networking platform we engage in for interacting with our customer, well-wishers and prospective users. Tweetdeck is a Twitter application that helps us organize, update and handle all your tweets and followers. The best part of this is the ease of managing conversations which interests you. Hootsuite is another web-based Twitter application we love. It’s best feature is the ability to schedule tweets for later delivery and it lets your whole team manage your Twitter presence. You can now sit back and relax while all your tweets are sent out at the scheduled times. Twitter has undoubtedly helped us gain users and so has Facebook. We continuously post our articles on our Creately’s Facebook profile – we have 200 fans currently and it’s still growing. We love it when our articles are re-posted, liked and commented by our fans from all over the world.
Photo and Video SharingSocial Photo, Video and Multimedia Sharing Sites are great tools for sharing photos, videos and presentations. At Creately we don’t do a lot of photo sharing, but all our screencasts, demo videos and tutorial videos are broadcast via YouTube and numerous other video sharing services. YouTube has been a great medium to help us reach out to users to demonstrate Creately’s ease of use and great diagramming capabilities. In fact, we’re working on a new video for our homepage at the moment - so watch this space! We also make presentations and upload them on Slideshare. Our users have always liked our attempt in presenting our landing page contents in simple slides. We’re hoping to do at least one slidehsare presentation a month. Fingers crossed!
WikisWikis are sites which allow people to freely create and edit any number of hyper linked web pages. These help people know about the Creately as online diagramming software, its use, benefits and features. Besides Wikipedia, there are a host of other niche wikis that may be useful to your business like - WikiHow, WikiSpaces & WikiAnswers. Social media plays a vital role in the marketing of Creately.com. These sites have contributed well in building traffic and will help any marketer promote his/her business. I’ve put together a quick diagram illustrating the 20 best social news sites that we engage in - so save it somewhere close and get working on your social media strategy!
Image By: Matt Hamm / CC BY-NC 2.0New Creately Team Plans
Today we’re very happy to announce the new Creately Team plans. We have seen that many of you use Creately in your own project teams already. But it has not been easy to manage who is in your team, who is being billed and for which plan or even which plan a team member requires. Creately Team plans solve these issues.
The Team plans are perfect for cross-functional Business, Design and Development Teams. If you run a consulting business, a design house or a development team - in fact if you are part of any team where visual communication and collaboration is key, the Creately Team Plan is designed for you.
Better Team ManagementCreately Team plans start from just $8.95/user/month with a minimum of 3 users in a plan. We think you’ll agree that this is excellent value with the entire team receiving all the capabilities of our Pro plan ($9.95/month) plus enhancements to project sharing. As the team owner you also have access to the team management portal which allows you to easily add and remove team members, assign new roles and dynamically increase or decrease your team size. The beauty of this is you only ever pay for the number of team members in your team. We don’t pigeon hole you by team size.
At-a-Glance
Here’s a quick look at exactly what you’ll get on the new Team Plan:
- Unlimited Export & Publishing with no Creately watermark
- Unlimited Diagram Storage
- Unlimited Diagram Sharing
- Unlimited Project Workspaces
- Project Sharing with no limitations, everyone on the Team can create diagrams in your Projects
- User management to add and remove Users from your Team account
- Team contact list so its easier to share within your Team
- Multiple administrator levels to manage large, distributed Project Teams
- Pay by Credit Card or Paypal
We’re confident the Creately Team plans will suit you and your project team.
Click here to upgrade to a Creately Team plan right away.
PS. Special thanks to everyone who’s helped us along the way with your support, feedback and kind words. The @Creately Team