I've been quite under the pump lately with the amount of traffic and downloads that have been happening for some of my DotNetNuke modules.  But I've taken some time out to add new features to this website:

- Product Support Forums

- New Product Pages (replacing just having blog entries on new releases)

- Open Id / Live Id support, and opening up the site for registered users

- New Products released

The most popular thing on my site by far is the FriendlyUrlProvider which has proved quite a hit.  Thanks to all the people who have been roadtesting it for me and feeding back bug reports and feature requests.  It's a much better product now than when I first released it.   I have had some people suggesting I should get it incorporated into the DNN core.  I'm happy with that as an idea but I've got a lot of things going on, I'll look at it down the track.   I think the main problem is that it's a bit more complicated than the vast majority of DNN website owners probably need, and it fills a niche with website owners who want to concentrate on SEO. 

I've no idea of what types of installations make up the majority of DNN installs.  If it's a majority of poeple using them in intranets, not-for-profits using them as community sites, or people building serious e-commerce on top, I've no idea.  That's why it's hard to put usage-specific functionality in the core, not to mention the needs of high performance, scalability, backwards compatibility and more.

The point is I finally upgraded this website to a new host where I could push a few more options specifically on the Friendly Url front, and as you can see I have it setup to use extension-free pages.  This is a case of dogfooding, which I suspect a lot of people were wondering 'if it's so good, why doesn't the site use it?'.  The truth is I've been concentrating on the major project of mine at the moment, auctionlink.com.au.  I wrote the Friendly Url Provider specifically for that site, and the SEO results have astounded me with their success.    The basic premise of that site is to list out Australian Auctioneers and the current Auction Sales they are advertising.  In many cases, the Auction Link page for an Auctioneer has outranked the actual Auctioneer themselves, and the site acts as a 'gateway' for that Auctioneer.  Of course that helps the business case a lot, but it really shows what a little attention to getting the basic SEO right will do. 

In some cases, the Auctioneers have paid (probably) big money for all-flash sites for their business.  They look lovely, like attending the launch of premium consumer goods on plasma TV's.  But they are absolutely useless as an ashtray on a motorbike because they fail to (a) tell the visitor what they have for sale at any give time and (b) get even basic information like name, address and phone number into the search results.  As a result, AuctionLink outranks them with a simple page of name, address, phone number and upcoming sales.  This is an important lesson in practice for anyone trying to understand the basics of getting the most from a website.

The other new installations for the site are the product support forums - most people were getting support via the Blog entry comments. While I always encourage blog comments, having the comments section run 4 times longer than the actual entry was starting to get silly, and I can't separate answers into threads.  I always said I wouldn't add a forum to the site until the traffic warranted it, and it's now reached that point.  So the Product Forums is up and running! I've also developed a firm policy and procedure for getting one-on-one support for installing and configuring the software that I create. I've done a lot of this lately, but people's promises to pay have been patchy to say the least. I enjoy helping people out and it helps all parties if there is a procedure to follow.

The Products page has been created, to service the need to contain non-technical information for people.  Previously I only discussed my developments in this blog, but for many people it was wrapped in a lot of technical talk that clouded the fact that they just wanted to download and try the code.

My first foray into selling DotNetNuke modules has arrived with the iFinity Tagger module.  This module is the one that provides the Tags attached to this page, and other pages within the ifinity.com.au website.  It gives the authors strict control over what is tagged on a page.  There are other tag cloud solutions on the market, but they either use the DNN search index (no help when a module doesn't use it) or automatically generate tags based on a page.   My module allows total control over what tags a page has, and this gives a much more concise (and usable) tag cloud as a result.  It also greatly assists visitors (by they the flesh-and-blood type or the Googlebot type) a way to deeply delve into site content without having to thrash around in hierarchial navigation.  I've developed a philosophy that hierarchies belong to the armies of the 19th century and the organizations of the 1950's and very little else.   People just like delving right into things and Tags are a natural response to that behaviour pattern.

On Design - no I haven't changed the look and feel of the site.  I ran a survey for a while, and the response was overwhelming in the negative 'no I don't like your site design'.  Fair enough, I thought, but I wonder what people thought was wrong.  So I'll leave that open.  Let me know what sucks about this website in the comments or forum, and I'll address it.  If you're a talented designer with DNN skinning skills, and you think you can make it much better, then let me know via the enquiries page and we'll talk turkey.  I've also got a lot of upcoming design work for clients, and I'm looking at outsourcing that. (oh, and this is not an invitation to be spammed by Indian software sweatshops, thanks very much - but if you're an independent Indian developer, no worries)