Thursday, January 22, 2009
Yesterday's task was to put together plans for EditMe in 2009. It was a constructive session resulting in a development plan to carry EditMe through the next year. Some themes emerged as over-arching goals for direction of the product and service, and I thought it would be nice to share those here.
Over the past few years, there has been a movement towards making EditMe work for both wikis and traditional content management. While wikis tend to be utilitarian in nature, traditional web CMS is more focused on navigation, design, and masking the fact that editing controls exist behind the content. I think EditMe has done a great job bridging the gap between wikis and traditional web CMS, but the time has come to refocus on wiki functionality. It's my conviction that the wiki ethos is becoming the de facto web ethos. The Web 2.0 and Semantic Web movements demonstrate this clearly, and wiki as a style of web site management will replace traditionally complex and siloed content management platforms. A refocusing on wiki-enabling features and usability will at the same time improve EditMe' s capability as a traditional web CMS. In short, by being the best wiki available, EditMe will serve many other purposes with flying colors as well.
You'll see this manifested in the choice of features and general product direction. Features found in other wikis like back links, orphan pages, wanted pages, better user tracking... these will come to EditMe, and take on EditMe's distinctive usability, quality and cohesive integration. Another way we've been thinking of wiki-like features is through the idea of a database of pages. Thinking of a web site as a database of pages, with various attributes, relationships, etc. makes the web site a flexible tool that can organize itself in useful ways. Expect to see features this year that support that idea.
EditMe is one of the few players in this space that has yet to offer a free version. EditMe's competitors have racked up huge numbers of users (not necessarily customers) by simply giving service away for free. The business motive behind this is that enough of these free users will upgrade to paid premium versions to pay for all the others, and that all the free users provide inexpensive word-of-mouth advertising for the service. Comparing EditMe's pricing to the competitors' - most of which are still charging per user - shows that they are padding their paid plans with higher premiums to pay for the free users, and that is something I want to avoid. Though this still requires significant research and planning, it has finally made it on the list of goals to at least vet the idea and either thoroughly disqualify it as a poor direction for EditMe, or to jump in and implement it. More on this to come.
Another big initative will be a site licensing option for EditMe. This will provide a large block of resources pooled together for a single price. Pricing for this will follow EditMe's tradition of charging customers based on our cost (you pay for data center resources, not the number of users who log into your site). While this has worked well for single sites, the site license will allow resources to be pooled across an unlimited number of sites. Again, more on this to come, but I wanted to get it out there. If this is of interest to you, please contact us and let us know what your situation is and how you might use such a license. I'll also be reaching out to some customers that I know might fit well into this plan.
Finally, I want to thank all the customers who have posted suggestions on the support wiki. These continue to provide excellent insight, input and help to shape EditMe's development.
